Ad plant.

Seth470

Member
Livestock Farmer
Looking into ad plants. And wondering what size I would need to feed 30 ton a day to it. Feeding Maize silage Grass silage and beet. Rough price on it. And how much digestate it would produce a day. how much It would make roughly.
 

Al R

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
West Wales
@Rob_AD will know more up to date than me but a 30t/day your looking at 500kw/hr.
I have no idea on where the tarrifs are now but it needs to be upwards of 14p/kw to make a 500kw pay. Cost anywhere between £2-3m or it was 6 years ago but technology/equipment may well have got a lot cheaper. You can’t put any old rubbish in it either it’s got to be silage like you’d do for a 10,000+ litre Holstein herd. Beet has got to be washed and destoned to within an inch of its life or you’ll have some serious downtime unblocking/rebuilding pumps, taking the roof off every so often to clean out soil/grit with cranes/bobcats etc is all downtime and if that engine stops you don’t earn a penny!

Not sure if their still going but the best systems i visited out of over 100 AD plants across Europe was Weltec (all stainless steel) and Marches Biogas in Ludlow although Marches was a lot dearer.

Once tarrifs dropped to below 8.9p/kw on a 1MW AD plant it became unjustifiable.
 

sjt01

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
North Norfolk
@Rob_AD will know more up to date than me but a 30t/day your looking at 500kw/hr.
I have no idea on where the tarrifs are now but it needs to be upwards of 14p/kw to make a 500kw pay. Cost anywhere between £2-3m or it was 6 years ago but technology/equipment may well have got a lot cheaper. You can’t put any old rubbish in it either it’s got to be silage like you’d do for a 10,000+ litre Holstein herd. Beet has got to be washed and destoned to within an inch of its life or you’ll have some serious downtime unblocking/rebuilding pumps, taking the roof off every so often to clean out soil/grit with cranes/bobcats etc is all downtime and if that engine stops you don’t earn a penny!

Not sure if their still going but the best systems i visited out of over 100 AD plants across Europe was Weltec (all stainless steel) and Marches Biogas in Ludlow although Marches was a lot dearer.

Once tarrifs dropped to below 8.9p/kw on a 1MW AD plant it became unjustifiable.
Ours is a Marches (well, Russell was working for Greenfinch when we started the build). Lots of good points, but much of the original equipment replaced by something that works and is easy to maintain.
AD will only work now on waste, or small scale using silage off the top and sides of a clamp, slurry etc, and probably only then if you utilise all the heat. We use it for grain drying, dairy hot water, cheese making heat, workshop heat, farmhouse, office, 3 farm cottages heat, and warm drinking water for cows.
We grow maize and lucerne for the digester, but get FITs and RHI. Without that I would go for solar in the day, and use slurry and waste silage to make gas to run a chp when no sun, also when heat needed.

Yield of electric per acre far better from solar than growing crops for AD.
 

Formatted

Member
Livestock Farmer
Cant understand how environmental friendly they are just burning desial to grow bacteria isnt very good for anyone

Growing a crop on subsided land, carting it around on tractors without road tax and on red diesel, and then putting it into the national grid as a subsided tariff. The general public would go mental if they understood how much they were being ripped off
 
Growing a crop on subsided land, carting it around on tractors without road tax and on red diesel, and then putting it into the national grid as a subsided tariff. The general public would go mental if they understood how much they were being ripped off
And paying young 17-18 year olds a salary wage and expecting them to do tractor work none stop I no a lad who worked on one and worked out he’d be making 4:30 a hour 😂
 

Bald n Grumpy

Member
Livestock Farmer
Growing a crop on subsided land, carting it around on tractors without road tax and on red diesel, and then putting it into the national grid as a subsided tariff. The general public would go mental if they understood how much they were being ripped off
Not to mention the tankers constantly hauling digestate, and upsetting the locals when you rent the ground around them for silly money that they can't pay
 

teslacoils

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire
Growing a crop on subsided land, carting it around on tractors without road tax and on red diesel, and then putting it into the national grid as a subsided tariff. The general public would go mental if they understood how much they were being ripped off

Thing is, the public -bless them - are stupid. They have no intention in reducing their consumption, but likewise done want

Ad - traffic
Solar - where are "our" fields gone?
Wind - spoils view
Nuclear - waste
Coal or gas - carbon.

In short, public thick as sh!t. That's why we have government to make decisions and to take the bollocking.
 

DairyGrazing

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
North West
Thing is, the public -bless them - are stupid. They have no intention in reducing their consumption, but likewise done want

Ad - traffic
Solar - where are "our" fields gone?
Wind - spoils view
Nuclear - waste
Coal or gas - carbon.

In short, public thick as sh!t. That's why we have government to make decisions and to take the bollocking.

Very tricky all of it. I think there will be another round of RHI as the government has made commitments to renewable energy.

It would be interesting to know if AD plants were net negative if you properly accounted for all the associated activities.

Imagine if the government said every property with a roof needed solar panels and a storage pack. Then use hydro/tidal lagoons/wind/nuclear/fossils for winter and peak demands.
 

bazza3034

Member
Location
co.tyrone
If the government would catch themselves on and make farmers and all landowners plant tree s on every bound on all farms and make it part of the bps of equivalent would certainly help the carbon footprint of alot of people around the UK as so much of the amazon is felled someone s go na have to make a difference or the flooding is go na get worse
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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