Manitoba Hydro is encouraging agricultural and industrial energy users to cut electricity and natural gas consumption by converting waste into energy.
Under the Bioenergy Optimization Program, introduced in August, Manitoba Hydro offers financial incentives to agricultural and industrial customers to help cover the cost of installing equipment to covert waste biomass into useable energy for use within the operation.
The incentives are based on the amount of energy offset and are set at 15 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity and 30 cents per cubic metre for natural gas.
Manitoba Hydro biosystems engineer Dennis St. George says the program falls under the Power Smart program which encourages energy efficiency.
There’s a whole array of technology out there.
Your can convert biomass in many different formats.
There’s your traditional combustion, for instance burning wood and making energy from that.
Then there’s what’s called gasification, basically expose the biomass to a high temperature in a controlled atmosphere with an amount of oxygen in it and it basically flashes to a gas that you could similar to natural gas.
You can do, it’s called pyrolysis, where you actually produce a liquid form so again you’re using this reaction of temperature and time and creating the product.
Then the fourth way is a biological approach where you may have heard the term anaerobic digesters and that’s basically a reactor that’s filled with microorganisms that are consuming the organic matter in the waste and actually make methane from it.
You can harvest the methane and use it as the energy source.
St. George says customers with readily available low cost sources of waste biomass can potentially offset disposal costs while reducing their natural gas or electricity costs and they may be able to take advantage of greenhouse gas offset programs and, for Manitoba Hydro, energy saved in Manitoba can be exported to the United States generating revenue that will help keep rates low at home.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
