Building with Renewable Energy
Building with Renewable Energy. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.
A lot of farming operations are beginning to build renewable energy projects like wind and solar and they are really seeing some benefits. Kent Maddison from Echo, Oregon says there was a driving force behind his decision to get into the renewable game.
MADDISON: Financial opportunity you might say. They were things that made financial sense to do so and had a payoff that was reasonable for a person my age and very little risk. And of all the agriculture I’ve been in for all the years there’s a lot of risk and not a lot of certainty in it but these renewable energy projects were all very risk adverse type projects.
Maddison got into renewable energy projects out of necessity.
MADDISON: Probably the main thing, Greg, is I’m a high lift pumper out of the Columbia River so we have a terrible power bill every year and so we just know that energy costs are not going to get less in the future, they’re undoubtedly going to become more so if we can create energy sources that maybe we didn’t use the energy off them but the revenue that can off of them could offset our energy costs, then as energy goes up in the future then our revenues off these projects will go up in the future the same proportionate amount.
He says it’s a great way to hedge their energy. They began with wind.
MADDISON: Our first wind project went together - I guess it’s been probably 5 years ago when it started construction. I think it’s been operating now for 3 years. And we’re half of a 64-megawatt wind farm that’s in this area and we own literally 3 of those machines ourselves and so that’s 4.95 megawatts. We consume about 3-megawatts of energy, our farm does when it’s running in the summertime, all the pumping load.
He says their hope was to become energy neutral but there are some issues to contend with.
MADDISON: We’ve built a lot of wind energy in the northwest that can now be a problem in July when the Columbia River is running at flood stage and the turbines are turning out a lot of energy through the wind and a lot of energy through the dams, we need to be storing energy somehow. That I think really is going to be our bigger issue in the northwest is the ability to store energy.
Do you know a farmer, forest producer or processor who is a true innovator in clean energy, who is harvesting a range of clean energy resources - renewable power, biofuels and/or energy efficiency? Let us know who you think should get the award and why. Nominations for the 2012 Ag Forestry Energy Innovators are open until October 26. More information at www.harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
www.harvestcleanenergy.org
