Harvesting Clean Energy Conference

Harvesting Clean Energy Conference. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

The 2011 Harvesting Clean Energy Conference gets under way in a couple of weeks at the Boise Centre. If you have any thoughts of exploring what clean energy projects can do for you and your operation then you might want to attend. Rhys Roth, Director of Strategic Innovation for Climate Solutions talks about the conference.

ROTH: The Harvesting Clean Energy Conference is really about powering rural economic development by learning from what works. We’re going to have several dozen practitioners, people who’ve made projects work on the ground who can talk to farmers, ranchers, rural landowners, rural businesses about hoe you overcome the barriers to make a successful project and cut your energy costs and grow new sources of profit.

Roth says there are really an endless array of opportunities.

ROTH: The technologies range from all sorts of energy efficient retrofits and energy efficient equipment to how you tap your wind power potential, solar power. How you tap irrigation canals to produce energy and small hydro projects to all sorts of bio-energy opportunities ranging from manure. Turning manure into power to producing feedstocks for the next generation of aviation fuels for Boeing and Alaska Airlines and folks like that.

There are still a lot of people that feel the energy answer is to continue with “Black Gold,” or “Texas Tea.” Roth says there is a lot more to it than that.

ROTH: Well energy is a big cost center for agriculture and for the food processing industry so if there’s opportunities to cut that cost, become more competitive; there’s opportunity to generate new revenue and bring economic development to rural communities and all that’s really important. Energy for our country is critically important. We’re importing a lot of oil from unstable places around the world and we need to address that. So there’s a national imperative and a business bottom line imperative.

Ag producers especially can get a lot out of attending.

ROTH: The average farmer is going to have access to people who have made projects work in operations similar to his or hers. There’ll be great hands on examples, they can ask questions. Very practical information and networking at this event.

For additional information on clean energy and the upcoming conference, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.???www.harvestcleanenergy.org