And likely not very many people around Princeton noticed what happened that day at the farm, an event that farmer Dennis Haubenschild claims was a first in the world.

Neither the public nor the cows likely knew why Haubenschild and two men from the University of Minnesota and a man from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture were celebrating last Friday with a cake and some champagne in a utility room on that farm.

What happened on Jan. 27, and what last Friday’s celebration was about, was that common cow manure was turned into electricity via a hydrogen fuel cell at the farm.

Phil Goodrich, the University of Minnesota principal investigator in the hydrogen fuel cell project at the Haubenschild farm, last Friday backed the assertion that this was a world’s first. The project was to see if running methane gas produced from cow manure into a hydrogen fuel cell could make electricity.

It was working, said Goodrich on Friday. He explained that electricity has been made from a fuel cell before but never from methane produced from “predigested, pre-collected, biomass.”

The Haubenschild cows have been forever linked to that event, which Haubenschild last Friday called a “monumental moment.” That moment was when the new hydrogen fuel cell at the farm began producing electricity about 3 p.m. on Jan. 27 from methane generated by manure from the Haubenschild cows.

About five years ago Haubenschild and his two sons had already supplied the means of getting the methane production started at the farm. They completed a project with the help of the state to set up an anaerobic digester to turn cow manure at the farm into methane gas.

The digester looks like a long plastic-covered tunnel into which manure is pumped. By the end of the manure’s passage through the digester, methane is produced and collected.

The remaining manure is spread on fields and works even better as a fertilizer than manure that has not gone through a digester, according to Haubenschild.

For five years the Haubenschilds have piped the methane gas into an engine that runs off the gas and turns a generator to produce electricity to run the farm and scores of homes beyond.

East Central Energy was one of the partners in that project and now Haubenschild says ECE no longer wants to renew a contract to buy the electricity produced at the Haubenschild farm at a rate that Haubenschild says would cover the generation costs.

Haubenschild explained how some utilities have been buying electricity produced by renewable sources of energy at a little higher rate than that paid for electricity generated from fossil fuels. The utilities have been selling the renewable source electricity to the public at the slightly higher cost, reasoning that the public wants to support the higher generating cost of sustainable energy sources, said Haubenschild.

If the public wants such programs like “wind power” and “cow power” to exist, they should call East Central, Haubenschild said.

Haubenschild said farmers like him can’t afford to subsidize consumers to buy energy from renewable sources by selling it for less than it cost to produce. He said it costs 5.1 cents per kilowatt hour to produce electricity from the fuel cell and Great River Energy will buy the surplus electricity from the fuel cell for four cents per KWH, said Haubenschild.

For the first three years of the contract with ECE, “we were oversubscribed” [by consumers wanting the methane-produced electricity] so it’s telling me the public is willing to do it,” Haubenschild said.

Hydrogen fuel cell

Now Haubenschild is betting that perhaps the public could get interested in one of the newest waves in energy research – the hydrogen fuel cell.

He even envisions selling tanks of the hydrogen fuel to gas stations where the public could buy the containers and hook them onto cars and trucks equipped with hydrogen fuel cells.

Setting up the hydrogen fuel cell at the Haubenschild farm required a $200,000 grant and it came from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund through the Legislative Commission on Minnesota Resources.

Bids were sought to supply the hydrogen fuel cell and a company called Plugpower was chosen. The machine is producing 120 KW/H, which means 120,000 watts per hour of electricity, using the methane coming out of the manure digester.

Haubenschild has been working on the project four to five years.

To make a long story short of how the chemical reactions take place, hydrogen that was in the methane is freed up inside the fuel cell. Hydrogen and oxygen end up on opposite sides of a series of plates coated with a proprietary 3M chemical.

Rich Huelskamp, the U of M technician handling the mechanical part of the project, explained that a voltage difference between the sides of the plates is created, causing electrons to flow. The electron flow is the electricity.

The voltage difference is the same principle that retired Princeton High School science instructor Mike Skavnak demonstrated in making a simple battery, said Haubenschild, recalling his days in high school.

Batteries of 48 volts collect the electricity from the fuel cell and an inverter converts it to alternating current like the kind used in homes, businesses and factories. The exhaust from the hydrogen fuel cell is water vapor.

The fuel cell was quiet as it generated electricity and so were Goodrich and Huelskamp from the U of M, and Matt Drewitz, a planner from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture quietly working as they studied the fuel cell last Friday. The fuel cell stands about six foot high, is about the same length across and is at least a yard deep.

Goodrich was clearly ready to celebrate Friday as he made a small sign that said, “The Fuel Cell Runs, Jan. 27, 2005” and taped it up inside the room where the fuel cell sat.

Huelskamp explained the various filters that the methane goes through on its way to the digester and pointed to the garage-type, gas-powered heater installed nearby to test the quality of the methane going into the fuel cell.

The advantage of having a fuel cell produce the electricity from methane rather than a standard internal combustion engine-powered generator is the type of exhaust, Haubenschild said.

The fuel cell’s water vapor exhaust is superior environmental-wise to the type coming out of standard engines, noted Haubenschild. That can help thwart the “not-in-my-back-yard” thinking that people have about electrical generators in their midst, and also get them to accept farmers helping supply energy for their neighborhoods, Haubenschild added.

“It’s a very interesting project using renewable energy in ways that it hasn’t in the past,” said Drewitz.

Part of the goal of the fuel cell project, Drewitz added, is to see how feasible it is to have these fuel cells on farms.

It’s a “monumental moment” not just for the Haubenschild farm, Haubenschild said, but also for the state of Minnesota, “whether the rest of the world appreciates it or not. It’s the stuff of science fiction that we were reading about in books in our time.”