Waste not

Farm biogas plant looks for council support

Last month, County council decided to withhold support from any applicant hoping to land a FIT (Feed in Tariff) 4 renewable energy power purchase contract. The County has soured on wind and solar developers who tend to ignore the municipality’s desire to protect its roads, bridges and other infrastructure, and who are reluctant to pay for the damage they cause.

All it took, however, was a few days reflection and a novel application for council to realize it may have acted rashly.

David Prinzen and his family operate an 80- head dairy farm in Bloomfield. The farm has coexisted well with neighbouring residents and businesses for 43 years.

Now Prinzen wants to generate electricity powered by his animal’s manure and corn silage.

With an anaerobic digester, that manure is fed into an oxygen-deprived tank, where bacteria break down the organic material below as the methane released is collected. Then it’s either collected to use for fuel in place of natural gas, or burned to create energy that can be fed into the electric grid. What’s left behind is carbon dioxide and water, and smells about as strongly as the exhaust of a new car.

Prinzen is applying for FIT 4 power purchase agreement. So he went to council looking for its support. Technically, he doesn’t need council’s blessing—municipalities can’t block renewable energy projects—but since Kathleen Wynne was elected Premier, she has nudged developers to work with local communities.

What this means is that a council resolution supporting the project is worth two points towards Prinzen’s FIT application. Given greater competition for both the lucrative rates developers can earn, combined with tighter available capacity in the electricity grid in the County, these two points are critical.

When it comes to novel and evolving technology, council struggles, at times, to know what it is supposed to ask of proponents like Prinzen and biogas plant vendor Chris Ferguson of Carbon Control Systems (CCS) in Millbrook. Instead, several council members took turns praising the young farmer, his innovative ways and green energy.

“An excellent idea,” applauded Bloomfield councillor Barry Turpin, speaking for many of his colleagues around the table. “I have no problems with a digester.”

It was left to Councillor Treat Hull to suggest that while it seemed a good idea, he worried about the risk of increased odours for the village residents and businesses.

“When digesters go wrong, it can be difficult,” said Hull.

Anaerobic digesters work by breaking down organic feedstock; in this case cattle waste and corn silage. It is a chemical process that can go badly awry if not managed well. In Newmarket, a digester was forced to close after a decade of complaints from neighbours about the persistent smell. A fruit grower in the Niagara region says yields are lower on trees near a neighbouring digester.

That is where CCS and its patented technology come into play. Ferguson has developed a real-time biochemical monitoring system that enables plant managers to understand the health of their system in real time, even remotely. Indicator molecules are detected to inform the operator immediately if a plant is under biochemical stress before a breakdown happens, increasing efficiency and saving time, energy, and operation costs. In this way, they can react and respond quickly and effectively to rebalance the process.

It is a technology Ferguson developed while a Masters’ student at Trent University and then adopted on his farm near Millbrook. Since 2011, he says he has heard no complaints from any of his neighbours.

“Nobody smells it. I can’t smell it. You can be standing beside it and not smell it. So the technology itself is a complete odor reduction system,” says Ferguson.

Maureen McDonald is a family doctor in Millbrook. She spoke to several neighbours of Ferguson’s farm on behalf of the Times about the digester in their community. No one, not even Ferguson’s neighbour across the road, could recall there ever being a problem with odour from Ferguson’s biogas plant.

“It looks like a pristine homestead with the usual farm outbuildings and another very neat round white outbuilding cluster that looks very strong and self-contained,” said McDonald. “I think that this is the way of the future for large head dairy operations and Chris Ferguson’s farm is an exemplary prototype.”

The health of a digester is also dependent on the predictability of the feedstock. The digesters that typically run into trouble often try to extract biogas from a wide variety of materials and waste, including garbage. The resulting chemistry is less stable and can lead to stinky problems.

Prinzen intends to use only manure and silage produced on his farm. He adds that both the digester and storage are contained within enclosed structures.

Councillor Kevin Gale wanted to know how long the Prinzen family had operated their farm in Bloomfield.

“Long before Bloomfield became a tourist destination,” added Gale, answering his own question.

Councillor Jamie Forrester picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Gale.

“I am very supportive of this proposal too,” said Forrester. “But I hope we don’t start picking winners and losers based on family names.”

When the sparring was done, council sent the matter back to staff to prepare a report to reconsider its position on this application and roofmounted solar projects.