The Yomiuri article follows with the link where it was gotten. According to my information Yomiuri articles come off the web after very few days.

Residue remaining after gas has been extracted is expected to be used as fuel. The pilot project is to continue until next fiscal year. Naoki Ito, manager of the ward’s Environmental Affairs Division, said, “We hope to use biogas energy to supply hot water and air conditioning to the athletes village [scheduled to be built] in the ward if Tokyo hosts the Olympic Games in 2016.”

Let’s see now 70 tons of manure a day at 60 kg per cow is an equation 70,000kg divided by 60 equals a plant that handles the excreta of 1200 cows. Okay 6 dairy farms. Well, 8 farms of size of Mr. Ando’s above and only 4 farms of those households where I have the pleasure to teach their children.

The plant was built at a cost of 1.7 billion yen and returns a profit of 2-3 million yen. Let’s see ….3,000,000 divided by 1,700,000,000 that’s a rate of return of .17 percent …less than two tenths of 1 percent. Is that before or after the plant makes payments on the monies borrowed to build it? What allowance is made for replacing the plant when it breaks down and wears out? Mr. Konibata didn’t ask or the Yomuiri editors didn’t think it important to tell us! The Hokkaido Government built it …but who financed it? Who okayed it? Where did the money come from?

Did Mr. Konibata think it important to find out what similar plants cost to build and run elsewhere in the world? And what are the reasons for the differences?

Mr. Konibata thinks it important to tell us that in Germany( a pioneer in making biogas) the government mandates the purchase of biogas generated electricity at a premium but not how much a premium compared to Hokkaido’s already high price of electricity. Let’s see making the Hokkaido consumer pay 300% of the current electrical price would raise the rate of return on the investment to what?

In cases like these what is needed is a forensic accountant. Maybe if the entire staff of the Yomiuri Shinbun were forced to invest their pensions in projects like these they would learn to ask the questions that make up responsible journalism. (end of letter draft)

Don’t get me wrong I believe alternative energy is needed, biogas production from manure is an excellent way of reducing greenhouse gases while moving from fossil fuel consumption to a process that creates CO2 from a cycle where the CO would have normally been created in the decaying of grass and manure and removes CO2 from the air when new forage corps are grown. What fuels my anger is that this…this project with its astronomical costs and terrible rate of return is a disgrace; a disgrace to Japan, a disgrace to Hokkaido and a disgrace to the good name of Japanese engineering. There was another project, a wind farm project in Hokkaido that had to declare bankruptcy. A town in Hokkaido financed a dai-san sector project where the rate of return was ‘mistakenly’ calculated by someone missing a decimal point!! These projects are alternative energies biggest enemies….swallowing wasteful amounts of government monies and creating an entire industry whose goal is to maximize “there’s gold in this there green fad” instead of to economically produce green energy. Producing not a bang but a whimper for the taxpayers buck.

Let’s do some more math round down again to 50kg a day of excreta per cow. 70 tons divided by 50 is 1400 cows. The capital cost of the plant was 1,700,000,000 yen divided by 1400cows … so …This plant was built at the per head cost of 1,214,285 yen per cow. Let’s do that in dollars 100yen to the dollar exchange rate. Today’s rate was around 93 yen to the dollar.. Okay $12,142. per head. A capital cost of $12,142 dollars per cow.

A windfarm is called a windfarm because it sites multiple towers in a single location. Leading to efficient construction and very efficient maintenance, 1 maintenance crew minimizes travel time going from 1 tower to the next.

A single tower located 1 hour a way from the next tower is not green and any amakudari staffed Tokyo office funding them has proven their incompetence. A single tower only makes economic-green sense only if it saves transmission losses and local electric consumers can buy power at a cheaper rate.

The government gives me, well a corporation I set up, not even me. but a totally independent transparent and not connected to any existing entity corporation. The “Inaka Hokkaido Agricultural Electric Development Corp”

The government also gives us a hunting license to shoot bureaucrats and Ag-coop officials on sight. We receive 1 building permit and never have to go through the ‘regulatory’ costs, hoops and useless reports when we build biogas plants. Sending blueprints to bureaucrats who can’t understand what they see on them.

A forensic accountant rips through the accounts of the Shiraoichi project, not looking to “punish’ anyone but so we have access to knowing where the bloat is and can learn what suppliers to avoid.

(When my wife and I built our house we were told by persons in the construction industry that our blueprints had to be re-drawn so that the ‘city hall’ would understand them. Every change made to our blueprints ‘weakened’ the structure and in several cases made the actual structure unsafe)

Because of the nature of the Civil Service exams bureaucrats have little or no background knowledge that helps them understand engineering or construction.

We set up a construction team that doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time a biogas plant is built. So we build biogas plants to a common design getting good and efficient at it the way Toyota builds cars. It would be safe to say that most if not all of the 20 or so biogas plants in Hokkaido were separately ‘custom’ designed and engineered. With hundreds of hours of time being wasted drawing blueprints, making permit applications and making reports to people who don’t know how to read them. With the majority of equipment used in them having to be ‘custom’ designed and fabricated.

Our construction team moves directly from 1 project to the next. Our design team only has to make minor changes in moving from 1 project to the next.

Architects and design engineers operate in Japan usually on a percentage of the construction cost. There is a built in ‘incentive’ to over engineer public works projects and to also require unnecessarily items or unnecessarily expensive options. (my favorite examples are top quality solid hardwood flooring going into a municipal funded ski lodge…to be walked on by people in ski-boots so the floor has to be covered in expensive rubber matting….and a mushroom so over engineered it would be like a car with 2 engines)

Using the pre -existent slurry tanks at farms in a municipality we take over excreta management at farms one at a time by lottery as long as 1. the farm has some sort of existing system we can use and 2. it comes close to making sense by scale. Basically we won’t do anything for the 70 year old operator who is milking 30 cows except make it possible to truck to the nearest on- farm digester. We build utilizing as much as possible the current facilities state of the art automated methane digesters. (what are the costs in loading and trucking excreta off farm to Shiraoichi’s plant and trucking the fertilizer back to the farms?) Trucking 70 tons a day (5-8 loads) a very short distance is not an efficient use of a truck and driver.

We would have to pay the farmer a nominal charge for the shit and charge him a nominal charge for spreading the post digested organic fertilizer.

This has to be set up so that it is neutral to the economic balance sheet of the farmer. Any industry wide plus benefit to the farmer is a subsidy while any specific site based rewards would create winners and losers. Because all farms would not get the systems at the same time and could not equally benefit. Imagine the envy and strife that this would cause in a small community.

We set up a full time state of the art honey wagon (slang for liquid manure truck) system…and where possible ‘state of the art’ slurry “towed hose injector” systems that minimize the N nitrogen lost to the air (a further saving of chemical fertilizer that more often than not is made from fossil fuel). A full 50% of travel time from traditional liquid and solid spreading is spent towing an empty spreader while over 80% of towed hose injection is actual spreading.

so as long as it is possible we have drivers and honey wagons in full time operation. Minimizing both labor(waiting for the honey wagons to be filled) and capital spreader costs. The farmer is thus freed from the costs of having to keep and maintain manure spreaders in operation only a few days a year.

Hydrogen sulfide gas is scrubbed from the methane and sent to any fertilizer manufacturer that will use it.

Our electrical generation internal combustion engines are set for automatically timed operation to generate power at the ‘solar’ production peak so Hokuden pays us the mandated “photo-voltaic rate”.

At the end of the first three years when we have constructed as many plants as possible with our seed capital we do the math and return our seed capital slowly 10% a year in the form of 10 or 20 year bonds that pay a reasonable interest rate based on our actual returns. As we get better we can reduce construction costs to that approaching Germany and the USA.

For your information construction wages are higher in both countries it is ‘efficiency’ that keeps US construction costs down. We can then have realistic rates of return on investments that equal and beat similar investments in the USA and Germany.

In return the central government guarantees new bonds we issue that pay for the new plants we continue to build. Using a predictable rate of return we can issue bonds that pay much better than alternative non-risk investments in Japan. Purchase of such bonds is then restricted to the local municipal governments in the towns we build methane plants. We create a computerized 1 day a month bond market where outside financial institutions bid up the price of bonds to where the rate of return equals the lower rates of return elsewhere. First tier bond purchasers (local governments) are then mandated to use all the profits from sales to pay down and off the mountains of debt they have accumulated following Tokyo’s economic development models.

We ourselves don’t get paid very much until our operation is successful.

Within 3 or 4 years our business model can be cloned and set up in other parts of Hokkaido and agricultural Japan. A singular infusion of capital from the National government can thus result in a sustainable self-supporting industry with considerable growth potential. But only if the government and construction tribe stays out!! Only if we get the freedom to slice through any structural and regulatory obstacle that raises our costs or slows us down!!!

I am convinced that once the Aegean Stables of bloat, political kickbacks, inefficiency, over regulation, fraud and outright incompetence are driven out of the system Hokkaido and Japan could have a new industry creating jobs that would all of us could be proud of.

Our expertise can be also channeled into cost effective micro-hydro and small to medium scale wind projects in which we deliver power on to the grid minimizing ‘transmission losses and mandating Hokuden to charge the municipally based consumer exactly what they offer us. (Hokuden still makes a hook up fee and money on the residual power they sell the local consumer)

“Yumi-cho” a fictional name for a real town in Hokkaido builds a windtower on the hill overlooking it’s main population center. The Hokuden gives the town about 14 yen per kwh for the power it buys and turns around and sells it to households within 1000meters at rates between 19 and 29 yen per kwh.

These visions and desires do not generally exist in the civil service whose educational background to pass the civil service test is woefully incomplete. It usually does not exist in the construction tribe who have little experience outside of bloated public works dependencies and resulting political donations. It does not exist in the political elite who can’t read a balance sheet and don’t know the meaning of the term to “stand guard over the public purse”.