From pig-manure power to wind farms, Virginia’s Dominion Energy is transforming itself into a renewable energy powerhouse—Berkshire Hathaway’s cash will only accelerate the process.
From pig-manure power to wind farms, Virginia’s Dominion Energy is transforming itself into a renewable energy powerhouse—and Berkshire Hathaway’s cash will only accelerate the process.
But today, Westerbeek has a better story to tell. In recent years Smithfield has been working to perfect methods of capping lagoons with heavy plastic covers that trap the methane . The gas inflates the plastic domes in amounts sufficient for people to walk on—like an extremely gross air mattress. Smithfield has partnered with Richmond, Virginia-based utility giant Dominion Energy to market the gas.
For Buffett, the deal complements Berkshire Hathaway’s existing 16,000-mile pipeline network, thus supporting his bet that natural gas will put the final bullet into coal and be a mainstay of U.S. power generation for decades to come. Berkshire already owns massive wind farms that generate 6,600 megawatts across the West—so it is also knee-deep in renewable energy. And Berkshire’s money will do double environmental duty, as Dominion will use some of the cash to help build its green future.
A big contributing factor: the changing economics of renewable power. “Solar was not affordable; five years ago we didn’t have a single panel,” Farrell says. Now Dominion, which had profits of $1.4 billion on revenues of $16.5 billion in 2019 , is the fourth-largest solar operator in the country. After $40 million in R&D write-offs they settled on perfecting the systems being deployed today, whereby each farm’s manure lagoons have been turned into anaerobic digesters that capture its gas and sends it via pipeline to a centralized processing plant. After about three weeks in the digester, what’s left of the manure comes out the other end as sterile, nutrient-rich organic matter used as fertilizer or even livestock bedding. The now less odoriferous water is sprayed on crop fields.
Renewable fuels are a priority at the EPA. To ensure that refineries and utilities use the mandated volumes of green fuels, the EPA requires that they either generate or trade for compliance credits . Thanks to its negative-carbon attributes, livestock gas qualifies for the highest-value credits—meaning that customers could pay Dominion ten times more for hog gas than for the same quantity of gas fracked out of shale formations.
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