A company called Fibrowatt USA has narrowed its site search to three places in central North Carolina. Robbins is one of them.
The technology comes from Britain, where Fibrowatt Limited built the world's first generator fueled entirely by "chicken coop sweepings" or "chicken litter." Last week, three men from Moore County made a whirlwind trip to England and back to see for themselves.
Standing on the edge of a Boy Scout Camp in Suffolk, Ray Ogden, David Cummings and Harry Hubreth gazed up a green and grassy slope at a gray building. The air was fresh and clear, carrying no trace of any chicken yard or hint of what was going on inside.
"One of their plants is actually in the middle of a national forest," said Ogden, executive director of Moore County Partners in Progress. He'd brought along Cummings, chairman of the Moore County Board of Commissioners, and Harry Hubreth, president of Moore-Force (Moore for a clean environment).
This plant at Eye, in Suffolk, burns 160,000 tons of chicken litter a year, fueling its steam-driven 12.7-megawatt generator. Another plant the three visited, in Thetford, is the largest chicken-litter-fueled plant in the world. Its 38.5-megawatt generator is Europe's largest biomass-fueled electricity producer. Thetford is centered in England's poultry-producing region and consumes 420,000 tons of litter each year.
What's left is an ash that is then sold as high-quality fertilizer. Only a whiff of white steam drifting lazily from a single tall chimney gives any indication of the fires within.
"I used to tell people about poultry houses that it smells like money to me," said Cummings, a poultry farmer. "But this doesn't have any scent at all."
See Wednesday's Pilot for the full story.
