Lousy Prices for Vermont’s Cow Power Pioneers

Steve Taylor
New England Correspondent

BRIDPORT, Vt. — Sometimes being first isn’t the best — just ask Marie Audet.
She runs the books at Blue Spruce Farm, an 1,100-cow dairy that installed a manure digester in 2001 and began selling electricity to Vermont’s largest utility.

Trouble is, her farm and two other large Vermont dairies began producing power under a state law that tied their price to the New England wholesale power market price per kilowatt-hour. A different law covers dairy farms that developed methane-fueled generating setups later.

With slack regional demand, the New England wholesale power market price has recently fallen such that the three pioneering “cow power” farms —Blue Spruce in Bridport, Green Mountain Dairy in Sheldon and Montagne Farm in St. Albans — were receiving only about half what the later adopters were getting per KWH.

Audet says the decline in the pay price was so steep that none of the three farms could cover the debt and operating costs of running their digester-generator systems.

Earlier this month the Vermont Public Service Board issued an order that gives the farms a measure of relief, but it’s only good for 180 days. That presumably will allow for either a new power arrangement to be developed between the three producers and the utility to buys their power, Central Vermont Public Service, or for the legislature to fix the conflicting laws that are at the root of the problem.

Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie and State Rep. Chris Bray, whose district includes the Blue Spruce Farm, have taken up the cause of the three aggrieved farms and will try for remedial legislation in the 2010 session of the Vermont legislature.

They want to see all Vermont dairy farms producing electric power put on the same financial footing.

Prior to the Public Service Board’s temporary order, the three pioneer farms were receiving just under eight cents per KWH, while the farms with more recent digester-generator setups were getting 16 cents. The temporary order gets the three up to the 12-cent level.

Marie Audet is lavish with praise for what Dubie —now a Republican candidate for governor — and Bray have accomplished already with their appeals for Public Service Board intervention. “Without them we never could have achieved what’s been done so far,” she says.

One of the three Public Service Board members dissented in the case. John D. Burke said he sympathized with the three farms’ predicament, but argued that the board couldn’t on its own alter the clear language of a statute.

Vermont now has 10 large dairy farms operating digester-generator setups.

State policy encourages their development in keeping with goals for expanded renewable energy production. Federal rural development dollars have played a key role in getting most of the projects underway, helping to attract in loan money from Farm Credit, commercial banks and other lenders.

The state’s aggressive environmental lobbies have been generally supportive of “cow power” development because it helps ameliorate groundwater contamination caused by excessive nutrient buildup, especially of phosphorus.