Economic feasibility of converting cow manure to electricity: A case study of the CVPS Cow Power program in Vermont

Qingbin Wang, Ethan Thompson, Robert L. Parsons and Glenn Rogers

No 104564, 2011 Annual Meeting, July 24-26, 2011, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: A case study of the Central Vermont Public Service Corporation (CVPS) Cow Power program examines the economic feasibility for dairy farms to convert cow manure into electricity via anaerobic methane digestion. The study confirms that it is technically feasible to convert cow manure to electricity on dairy farms but the economic returns highly depend on the base electricity price paid by CVPS, premium rate paid by CVPS customers, financial supports from government agencies and other organizations, and sales of the by-products of methane generation. Lessons learned from this program will be useful to other dairy farms and communities interested in converting cow manure into electricity.

Keywords: Agricultural Finance; Consumer/Household Economics; Demand and Price Analysis; Environmental Economics and Policy; Farm Management; Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 2
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/104564/files/Wang%20AAEA%202011%20poster.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea11:104564

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.104564

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2011 Annual Meeting, July 24-26, 2011, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().