Manitoba Hydro is handing out more than a $1 million to any hog farm or big industry willing to turn potato peels and pig manure into power.
The Crown corporation unveiled its new biomass project Wednesday - an incentive program designed to prod about 250 of Manitoba's biggest hog farms, food processing plants, pulp mills and other polluters into producing their own electricity using waste products.
The idea is that, instead of paying to dispose of hog manure, wood chips, crop stubble or any other kind of natural waste, a company can use it to power an electricity generator and even go one step further and capture the heat from combustion to warm a facility.
Hydro is willing to provide up to $1.25 million for the capital costs of installing the right equipment, which can cost millions.
Hydro hopes to save about 10 megawatts of power and stop a cumulative total of about 65,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases from escaping into the atmosphere over the next decade.
"We think this is a really unique program that's unequalled in Canada," said Manitoba Hydro President and CEO Bob Brennan.
But Joseph Hogue, manager of new business development at flax-fibre processor Schweitzer-Mauduit, said he'd like to see Hydro think a little bigger and use biomass to add electricity to the province's entire grid instead of just at a handful of plants and farms. That could mean building a biomass power plant or even converting the aging Brandon coal-fired power plant to biomass.
The province has a massive supply of fuel from crops alone - close to a million tons a year. Instead of burning the stubble leftover after harvest, a practice that blanketed parts of southern Manitoba in thick haze last fall, crop residue can be gathered up and used by Hydro as a fuel for a power plant.
Last fall, about 400,000 tons of stubble was burned, which could have heated 100,000 homes all winter, said Deny St. George, Hydro's senior biosystems engineer.
But he said converting the Brandon coal plant to biomass would mean totally overhauling the plant's design.
And any new plant needs a consistent source of biomass within a certain radius to make economic and environmental sense. A stubble-powered plant is a possibility in the future, but first Hydro is encouraging small-scale farms and industrial plants to use the waste they already produce on site to create their own electricity.
That gives Hydro more power to sell abroad and could save a large hog barn $15,000 a year in power bills.
maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca
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