This is not a good idea, no, just not a good idea
We're pretty sure that someone around here is losing their minds:
The grass is always greener than the gas on the other side, according to a British businessman who claims grasslands could provide enough gas to heat all of the UK’s homes.
Dale Vince, the chairman of renewable energy company Ecotricity, is investing £10m in the first of a generation of what he calls ‘green gas mills’ that he says could compete against gas from fracking.
The company said its Hampshire plant at Sparsholt College, which has planning permission and is slated to be operational in 2018, will take grass harvested from nearby fields and break it down in an anaerobic digester.
Grass at the plant would be turned into biomethane within 45 days and then injected into the national network, providing the heating needs of more than 4,000 homes.
This might be sensible, might not be. Without seeing the numbers it's difficult to tell of course. However:
A report by Ecotricity on Thursday said there are around 6m hectares of suitable grassland in the UK, not including arable land for crops. It argued this would be enough to match the amount of gas the National Grid forecasts homes will consume by 2035, but doing so would require the building of around 5,000 mills akin to the Hampshire one.
Vince admitted that getting to that point would be a huge challenge, given no other country had done it before and it was a new approach in the UK.
“It would be a massive undertaking but it would be permanent. Grass keeps growing, it doesn’t run out, unlike gas from fracking. Most of the value would be in the hands of farmers who, post-Brexit, may be in need of it,” he told the Guardian.
Each of these green gas mills requires about 4 acres of land. So, we're to put 20,000 acres of land underneath factories. Entirely gut the total livestock industry by diverting its major feedstock, God's green grass. As opposed to drilling a few holes in Lancashire.
And we're going to do this in the name of preserving the environment?
Someone around here has lost their minds and we're really pretty sure that it's not us.