Power to the Chicken!

cc photo by flickr user fuzzy gerdes

This morning the (rather hilarious) news reached me that the Netherlands are going to use chicken poop as a source of energy. Hilarious in a good way of course.

So what's going to happen in the little country I live in? Well, our minister of agriculture announced that they're going to built a biomass power plant which can extract energy from chicken manure. The plant is going to cost a fierce 150 million Euro, but in return it gives power to 90,000 households. This by using 440,000 tons of chicken manure annually.

That's a medium sized city running on chicken poo!

But it gets just a little bit better. Normally farmers use the chicken manure to fertilize the land. So they can grow crops on it. When this happens carbon dioxide and methane are released into the environment which contributes to the enhanced greenhouse effect. Now there's less chicken poo to do this with so farmers will look into cleaner alternatives.

Jay, this was one good day for green energy in the Netherlands.

-jdh