Sheffield — Louis Aragi whips a four-wheeler around Pine Island, his family’s dairy and feed farm in the heart of vast corn and alfalfa fields, explaining why he never has to cut a monthly check to the electric company — they cut a check to him –– and how the farm powers itself and adds two thirds of what it makes to the power grid.
Aragi is making more energy than the grid, and the utility company, will allow. He wants to stop wasting it, but utility company rules and an outdated grid system are making it difficult — and very expensive — for him to add his excess into the grid.
He stops at a violently pungent vat of liquefied cow manure that went through a massive heating tank called a “digester,” before it came back to the vat to do something akin to fermentation. The digester does a bunch of things all at once; it kills pathogens, creates energy, readies crop manure and produces bacteria-free bedding for the cows.
“The stench is my energy,” Aragi says, laughing. “If it stinks that means I left some money in it.”
It is an overwhelming smell, and remains in the sinus cavity for a least a day, affecting even taste. It is powerful because it is basically gas, methane, and it is that gas that Aragi harnesses into energy here at Pine Island Farm, started by his father and grandfather in 1964.
Aragi, 45, moves like a man who is powered by something more than the rest of us. It’s a good thing, since this farm operation, with a total of 1,600 cows, requires stamina and a sharp mind. Energy isn’t all that’s created here; this farm and family compound, where Aragi has lived his whole life, is almost entirely self-sufficient. He and his family live next door to his father, Louis Sr., who lives next to the cows. There are many dogs, a few horses, a vegetable and flower garden, chickens and a smaller stable of Jerseys that Aragi’s wife, Holly, milks for the household. Aragi bow hunts and freezes the venison. Yet Holly jokes that her two teenagers are like all others — they like that store-bought junk they see at school.
Aragi says he even plans to run a gas pipe from the digester to the house.
This self-contained farming system of some intricacy has forced the Aragis to develop keen financial wherewithal, and learn skills like grant writing. In 2011 the Aragis had $2.2 million in farm energy and other grants to buy the digester, but still had to do battle with a farm credit bank during a desperate period of low milk prices, nearly losing that grant money as a result.
The giant tank is attached to a large engine that processes the manure 24/7, heating it and killing all pathogens and weed seeds, reducing the need for pesticides on the farm’s 970 acres of corn and alfalfa fields.
He gestures at the 48 gallon spreading truck taking on a load from a giant 4.1 million gallon tank that stores digested slurry during the growing season and “in the dead of winter.” He says the digester has also saved him $40,000 in fertilizer costs.
He explains that the digester — to which he also adds certain kinds of waste from local businesses, like oats and barley from Berkshire Mountain Distillers — also continuously pumps out a mountain of bacteria-free solids, used as dry bedding that is replaced daily with a fresh supply. This system, he says, prevents bacterial udder infections.
“It’s all about keeping the cows as happy as we can,” he says. “And we’re always cooling cows.”
Cows are always hot, as it turns out. “101 degrees,” Aragi says. Even the water he uses to shower them is recycled back out into the fields. And happy cows are good producers. Every day these cows fill a tractor-trailer truck with milk hauled off mostly for use in fast food chains. Aragi says the farm spends millions just to feed the cows every year; though the farm grows its own, the cows require a few different specialized feeds that must be imported.
On the roof of the digester, one can see the pipe infrastructure for the gas that runs between the tank and the engine room, an attached barn building. This is the system that saves the Aragis $80,000 per year in utility costs and where kilowatts are tracked by several gauges, including one for what is thrown into the power grid run by National Grid. Aragi sells that power to National Grid and off-takers such as The Red Lion Inn, The Berkshire Brewery, Ward’s Nursery and Wilkinson’s Excavating.
This buying and selling process, whether from solar, gas or wind production, is known as “net metering,” and it is at the center of a nationwide controversy over net metering caps that limit the amount of this extra that can be added to the grid. Renewable energy advocates say caps are hindering the expansion of clean energy, and keeping communities from reaping cost savings.
In Great Barrington, for instance, the town and Berkshire Hills Regional School District have signed a net metering agreement with a solar producer who is currently installing arrays in Housatonic that will save thousands in annual electric costs. A wind turbine soon to be installed by the Town of Otis is estimated to save the town $100,000 per year and throw off enough extra to sell to other towns and school districts.
Net metering caps are part of the glitch in Aragi’s system. He walks around to the back of the digester and points up at unused gas flaring from a metal tower. “There’s only so much the engine can use,” he said. “It’s wasted energy. This is why we need a second engine.”
It’s a perfect Catch-22: a second engine will produce more energy, which, without raising net metering caps, will lower the price that National Grid pays Aragi for his power. “I’ll lose my net metering,” he said.
“If the cap isn’t lifted, I’m in big trouble.” He noted that a solar producer got ahead of him by two weeks and scarfed up the remaining line capacity in the area, which also made him responsible for upgrading the system. “I’m the camel with the straw on my back right now.”
It gets even stickier from here. National Grid says that all that extra power from a second engine will require him to pay for a $390,000 upgrade to the Sheffield substation, and replace the farm’s transformer with a heftier model. National Grid wants 25 percent of that $390,000 by October 28. Without that $97,000 payment, he loses the $23,000 he paid — partly with grant money — for a line study to determine what the grid could take in.
The second engine project will cost a total of $3.3 million, including the grid upgrades. The Aragis have roughly $585,000 in energy grants to work with right now, and will secure a loan for the rest.
Aragi says net metering rules are hurting “guys like me who are in a pinch right now.” And he wonders what these caps do to the town. “Does this mean no more renewables in Sheffield? The capacity to put more on the grid is being stifled.”
Chris Vreeland is an engineer with an alternative energy consulting firm, Precision Decisions, LLC, in West Stockbridge. He is helping the Aragis hack their way through this tangle. Vreeland says Aragi is “tremendously gifted,” and that most farmers would not take this financial risk. Also, by “getting rid of methane,” Vreeland says, Aragi is reducing the food carbon footprint, critical “if were going to continue to live that lifestyle.” He said if we keep eating meat at the current rate, “we really need to do what Louis is doing.”
Vreeland calculated the amount of electricity that the Aragi farm makes as enough to power 200 homes. A second engine will increase the power output by 50 percent.
Vreeland says Aragi’s bind is an example of “growing pains within the [utility] industry” due to rapid growth of renewable power distribution. He said former Gov. Deval Patrick’s policies were progressive but “very general, without a lot of foresight into how difficult and cumbersome” the situation would become. “It’s nobody’s fault.”
“But it’s unfair that Louis’ project has to pay for the substation upgrade,” he added, noting that the second engine would cause a “bottleneck” in the grid system that has to be eliminated by whatever project trips it. “A lot of [energy] developers are out there to game the system, so [utilities] come up with more rules that hurts guys like Louis.”
Aragi told Sen. Benjamin Downing (D-Pittsfield) of his troubles. And Downing, he said, “is working hard to fix it.” Downing’s legislation to raise the state cap on compensation for solar producers who feed the grid met with unanimous approval in July. Gov. Charlie Baker followed by introducing a net metering bill to lift caps over a period of time, derided as by environmentalists as weak. Aragi said he also explained his situation to one of House Speaker Robert DeLeo’s (D-Winthrop) aids.
Vreeland says it’s going to be a tug of war until the utility companies upgrade their systems. “The grid isn’t designed to handle a high level of distributive generation, and the utility doesn’t want to pay for it, they want the projects to pay. So the industry has to face this issue: how are we going to get the utilities to upgrade?”
Watching Holly Aragi make green tomato preserves, Aragi sits at his kitchen table and sets down National Grid’s $97,000 bill, due October 28. He says he’s gambling.
“I’d be a fool to move forward if I didn’t know net metering will be changed…But I’m not sleeping that well at night.”