Sauce
DORCHESTER (WAOW) -- A Clark County man is turning waste from his farm into enough electricity to power nearly 250 nearby homes.
Steve Bach's family dairy farm sits just outside the Village of Dorchester. His herd has 2,600 herd of cattle. Also on his farm is a complex machine that takes cattle waste and turns it into power. It literally separates cow manure, removing the solid from the methane gas. That gas goes into a 500 horsepower engine. It powers a generator that produces the electricity. The energy is then pumped into power lines and into hundreds of rural Dorchester homes.
It's a process that's making use of a smelly product and making Bach money.
"I think for the sale of the electricity and getting better usage of the manure coming out of the cows." Bach says, "I put it mostly in bedding, to bed my cattle and cut my manure odor for the local community."
Bach's herd produces about 30,000 gallons of waste daily. Before he started digesting it, that waste was stored in pits and spread on fields for fertilizer. It's still put on fields now, but without methane gas, it's far less stinky.
"The methane is what gives the odor to the manure and I live really close to Dorchester. So, but putting this in, it should take all the odor out of the manure when we spread the manure in the fields in the spring and fall."
The electricity is pumped to homes through Taylor Electric Cooperative.
President and CEO, Mike Schaefer says, "It's using that waste and it's helping reduce the amount of methane being released and renewable energy, of course, helps us reduce that dependency on foreign oil."
About 90% of Taylor Electric's power comes from coal. Now, by using a resource found on hundreds of farms in the area, that dependency is greatly reduced.
"We're the dairy state." Schaefer adds, "We should be able to get more of these and produce energy out of it. I think it's just a great thing."
The solid part of the waste is used for cow bedding. Bach uses about half for his own herd and sells the other half to other area farmers.