Pig Shit and Solar Panels

The Green Revolution has become so institutionalized that you never know from whence the next bloom will blossom. Take 34 year old Heiner Gaertner’s 135 year old, 200 acre pig farm in Buttenwiesen, a village near Augsburg, Germany. The trouble was when his 69 year old father turned the spread over to him in 2002, it was verging on bankruptcy. Brazilian pig farmers were raising them for half the cost in Germany. He considering selling most of his property, keeping only the family’s stone house his great grandfather built when he kept cattle, chickens, and other animals.

But it was no easy sell, because the new EU countries like Poland and the newly integrated East Germany had larger acreage and were therefore more viable economically, even though his farm with broad, flat meadows in the gently rolling countryside of Bavaria was attractive enough, but no easy sell. (Mark Landler, “Hot German July Doesn’t Face Farmer Who Reaps the Sun”, NYTimes (July 28, 2006).

He realized that the collapse in WTO tariff negotiations as well as threatened farm subsidies would not protect German farmers much longer. Gaertner, a recent graduate in agricultural engineering, was astonished at the great clusters of windmills that dotted the landscape of a classmate in Northern Germany.

Alas, wind is just not as permanent a feature of the Bavarian ecology as the coastal areas. And besides locals were getting antsy at bigger and bigger collections of those noisy, bird hating blades. Gaertner thought solar! For Germany passed a law in 2004 that guaranteed solar parks two to three times the normal price of electricity generated.

Both he and his classmate, Ove Petersen, were totally in the dark about solar power generation. So they sat down and tutored each other in the do’s and don’t’s of the new method of power generation. 10,050 solar panels later—and $5 millions in debt for construction costs—his generator were humming as well as earning him $600,000 a year (at that rate he can pay off his loan in 15 to 16 years!)

It can light up the nearby village of 7,000, but the electricity company also uses his capacity for heat waves to supply the air conditioners. Paradoxically this really hot July (the hottest on record since meteorologist kept track of such data) reduces his generators to only 83 percent of capacity! Heat slows down everything and everyone!

Where does the pig shit come in? Biomass is the magic word. When the sun falters, the 1000 pigs he’s kept make up the difference. You can’t always count on the sun, but the pigs never stop shitting! Meanwhile, Gaertner believes that even though he expects the government to reduce the subsidy, he’s safely on the track away from red ink. Greener thinking keeps him in the black!