Maybe its the farms selected for the FW study tour to visit in Germany but almost every one seems to be producing energy or the commodities from which it can be produced. First there was the dairy farmer who turned his cow slurry into methane then burned it to produce electricity. Then there was the man who was crushing rape seed and selling the resulting oil to a refiner who converted it into bio-deisel. The cake bi product also still contained some oil residues and this was used for domestic heating. The same man had a couple of electicity generating windmills although he was less happy with them because the site chosen had turned out to have insufficient wind, despite having had a test rig erected for a few months prior to installing them.
But the most exciting and probably most successful example we have seen was the farm where maize silage was being used as a direct feedstock for the production of methane with no livestock involved. To us this was real groundbreaking stuff and it appeared to be working more
profitably and more reliably than any of the other alternatives.
In every case the energy produced was being sold to power stations at prices guaranteed by the government for twenty years. In some cases there was also a government subsidy to help with the capital expenditure. These incentives have been available at significantly higher rates than, say, the 20p/lit reduction from fuel excise tax avaialable in Britain and clearly that is why so many German farmers have felt it worthwhile. But these subsidies are set to be reduced shortly and participants will soon have to sell their energy at market price.
Which may not be a bad thing if you assume, as most do, that the price of oil will stay at current or higher levels. And the point is that by powerful encouragement of the production of alternative energy the German government has achieved its 10% sustainable target. Its future objective is to derive 20% of Germany's energy needs from renewable resources by 2020 and it seems on course to do so. It makes Britain's 2% without any meaningful commitment to encouragement seem rather inadequate, despite our outgoing Prime MInisters boasts that we are leading the rest of the world.a