BOSTON–AGreen Energy LLC (AGE) is pleased to announce that the US Treasury Department has awarded a grant of $946,950.00 to AGE through Section 1603 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This program awards funds for entities building renewable energy facilities in 2009, 2010, 2011, and beyond, if construction has begun by 2011.
The funds have been provided to offset some of the costs of building AGE’s first anaerobic digester at the Jordan Dairy Farm in Rutland, MA. The digester combines manure from the Jordans’ 300 dairy cows with food scraps from local processing plants to generate bio-gas energy, the vast majority of which is supplied directly to the grid.
Congressman Jim McGovern, who has been a supporter of the project from the outset and was a featured speaker for the digester’s Grand Opening on May 31 of this year, comments, “I am thrilled with this outcome. The public and private sectors must partner over and over across the country to replicate this project on thousands of small farms. There are no losers in this project — we create jobs, reduce emissions, protect natural resources, reduce dependence on landfills, and save our small family farms.”
AGreen Energy is a consortium of five Massachusetts dairy farms, in partnership with Ohio-based quasar energy group and New England Organics, a division of Casella Waste Systems. quasar designed and built the digester using equipment that is predominantly made in the USA. New England Organics manages the facility and delivers the organic materials from food processing facilities, which are combined with manure at the farms to produce the bio-gas. The AGE facilities use state-of-the-art process controls, enabling an off-site operator to run the plant using an iPhone. AGE supplies professional management not possible for one farm to do alone. These innovations won AGE the “Private Sector Leadership Award” from Mass Energy Consumers Alliance at their annual meeting on November 9. Two more AGreen digesters are scheduled to be online in MA by late 2012—one in Hadley, and the other in Deerfield.
