High on the hogs.

• Author: Williams, Allison
• Position: SPONSORED SECTION

Tom Butler is a Harnett County farmer, environmentalist and, now, his own electric utility.

For most, electricity is a one-way street flowing from a conventional grid to consumers. Butler is both customer and producer, thanks to a resource he literally had sitting around.

"We had no idea of the environmental impact when we started growing hogs," he says. "We went from 10 pigs to 8,000 pigs." Thousands of hogs create about 6,000 tons of methane annually, a number multiplied by 23 years as a contract grower for Clinton-based Prestage Farms Inc. Butler stored waste in covered lagoons and gradually burned off the methane. Until the microgrid.

The idea of a microgrid isn't new--hospitals, for example, might have one as a source of backup electricity in a storm--but the idea of a microgrid for a neighborhood is new. What if, during the next hurricane, your home still had power despite broad outages? Normally, a microgrid is connected to a traditional grid but during outages, it can operate in "island" mode, generating and storing energy independently.

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