Bill, This businesses are dairy farms. So they use power mainly for refrigeration to cool the milk and to pump water for irrigating their lands. There is not a hell of a lot one can do to reduce this consumption short of changing the technology completely. This would be ok for a new build but financially daunting for an existing set up. Instead, what we are looking at is to utilize a waste stream to reduce the dependence on power produced from coal. That is already a significant improvement over not doing anything at all. The power can easily be pumped into the existing infrastructure and is the least cost route both from a financial and a carbon footprint point of view.
Thanks for your viewpoint though. The CO2 can be used to help grow duck weed (as per Theo Bijman's company's approach) that can go back into the AD to improve the quality of the gas (higher methane to CO2 ratio) while recovering more gas and reducing the CO2 emission even more! All the best Rex _______________________________________________ Digestion mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address digest...@bioenergylists.org to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/digestion_lists.bioenergylists.org for more information about digestion, see Beginner's Guide to Biogas http://www.adelaide.edu.au/biogas/ and the Biogas Wiki http://biogas.wikispaces.com/
