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22 THE RURAL VOICE
and a life -time of interest, has a
prototype developed and will install
it in October. He is targeting hog
barns with 800-1,000 finishing pigs
but the unit he has designed is
modular, meaning additional units
can be added to increase the capacity.
He foresees the digester's output
being divided three ways: one third
to power the digester itself, one third
for on-farm use and one third for sale
to the grid. He admits that last third
is the difficult part 'at the moment,
estimating it would take a year to get
through all the red tape to be able to
sell to the grid.
arly experiments with
E
digesters, dating back to the
energy crisis of th,t 1970s,
found difficulty keeping the digester
warm enough for the anaerobic
process to take place. By insulating
the digester tank you can retain more
of the thermal heat of the process and
reduce the amount of outside energy
needed to keep the process going,
Verellen says.
Verellen grew up on a hog farm
and his father was an experimenter
with renewable forms of energy. As a
student, his own science fair projects
often involved some sort of exper-
iment with renewable energy. "It's
been a passion all my life," he says.
Right now the payback he has
been able to calculate for his digester
is about a seven years but he's trying
to bring that down to five years.
Currently the estimated cost is about
$55 per feeder pig for a basic digester
unit with other additions for further
treating the waste product of the
digestion process on top of that for
those who want those options.
His goal is to create a turn -key
system that can be set up on a farm
and be ready to go when installed.
While Jones hopes for some sort
of legislative initiative to boost the
viability of energy from biogas,
Verellen wonders if that's already
occurred because of the new Nutrient
Management Act. Perhaps, he says,
the value of meeting nutrient
management requirements may tip
the economics towards digesters. He
currently has two specialists at work
evaluating what benefit digestion
may have in meeting NM
requirements.
For one thing, his literature
explains, the process eliminates