Cows -> Manure -> Methane -> Power

Many of you remember our visit to the Cal-Gon Dairy last January and how we learned about the conversion of cow manure into electricity. It seems this idea is also catching on in California. The Guardian, a British (!) newspaper, published an article (“California cows start passing gas to the grid“) on Tuesday describing a new huge manure-to-methane operation being installed at the Vintage Dairy in Riverdale, California. The dairy contains 5,000 cows and the manure digester is described as “nearly 5 football fields and 33 feet deep.” This is quite a step up in scale from Cal-Gon operation (about 350 cows), but there’s still a long way to go. According to the Guardian, California is home to nearly 2,000,000 dairy cows.