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Abstract
By 2020, Dutch dairy chains envisage to be self-sufficient with regard to energy used by dairy farms and dairy processors. This would require dairy farms to produce 25 PJ per year, possibly
by a combination of wind, solar and biogas. Current analyses focus on biogas. To evaluate the
project’s feasibility we estimated the expected technical and financial performance of 4 types
of business models, i.e. “CHP-farm”, “CHP-large”, “green gas” and “central upgrading”. Data
stem among others from 23 biogas plants in the Netherlands. Anticipating that CHP-models and
green gas models occur with a likelihood of 40% and 60% respectively, the total number of biogas
plants at dairy farms would amount to 463. There would however be an expected deficit of
Euro 157 million over the project’s life time, i.e. Euro 0.02 per liter of milk. Fully switching to
green gas is expected to reduce the number of plants to 438 with an aggregated financial surplus,
i.e. of Euro 368 million. Findings are useful in current stakeholder debates on dairy chains’ sustainability,
and, more specifically, level of subsidies, availability of co-digestion materials and
market opportunities of digestate.