Growing Your Own Energy

Pyramid Farms is a greenhouse vegetable farm in Ontario Canada. After two generations of chasing the cheapest fuel to heat our greenhouse (coal to oil to nat gas to wood biomass) we are now growing our own fuel. We use 7000 Gj of energy per acre per year which equates to 35-40 acres of land needed to heat one acre of greenhouse. This may sound crazy but there were years that we paid as much as 14$ per Gj for natural gas equaling $100,000.00 /acre/year. I do not know of may crops on 35 acres gross 100 thousand dollars.
Today our heating costs (excluding land opportunity costs) are appox 15 to 20 thousand dollars per acre/year. With the land opporunity cost factored in we are still heating our greenhouses for less than the current cheap natural gas price (at a 10 year low). If a strong carbon policy is put into place we could be getting paid to heat our greenhouses. But for now we made a green solution economical. This is not just a one year solution, what is more important than the current savings is that this crop grows for decades with little to no inputs. We now have a multidecade line of site on our energy needs. In the greenhouse veg industry in Canada heating represents as much as 30-40% of our operating costs. We are now more profitable and stronger for the future.

We have since created New Energy Farms (www.newenergyfarms.com) that facilitates the development of dedicated feedstock crops like miscanthus for end users like myself or others that may have need for long term feedstock supplies