Going Green | Biomass Power Plants: Causing a stink!

Always a country to adopt different methods of doing things, the Netherlands have built the worlds largest Biomass Power Plant. This power plant has the capacity to power 90,000 homes from a totally renewable energy source.

One of the problems of today’s pastoral land, is that the sheer number of animals needed to sustain food levels, creates a huge amount of excess methane and CO2. This is why this Plant in the Netherlands is such a monumental achievement because it allows 1/3 of the Netherlands total chicken waste to be burn as fuel (440,000 tonnes if you were wondering).

As well as providing farmers an extremely good process of waste disposal, it means that those 440,000 tonnes of chicken waste will not be releasing any excess CO2 or methane, as they probably would have done if they had been put to use as fertilizer etc.

From this you can see what a difference biomass power plants can make, this power plant only uses chicken waste and only a third of the total amount at that! So it doesn’t take into account any of the multitude of other animals used in farming.

So whilst biomass probably couldn’t take care of all our power needs it still remains an awesome way to finally use animal waste for an extremely good environmental cause.