On Tuesday, North Carolina energy investor Leyline Renewable Capital Partners, which provides pre-construction debt and equity capital for renewable energy development, announced that it is joining forces with PurposeEnergy, a New Hampshire-based developer of industrial wastewater treatment systems that convert organic residuals into clean water and renewable power, on an unusual new project. Leyline’s funding will support the rollout of the SAINT project in St. Albans, Vermont, which will anaerobically convert industrial food waste–including Ben & Jerry‘s high-strength dairy waste and de-packaged ice cream, into 1MW of renewable energy and water.
The SAINT project will break ground this year and start processing ice cream waste in fall 2022. Once in operation, the project will generate enough renewable energy to power approximately 1,000 Vermont homes and will sequester phosphorus, preventing it from entering the Lake Champlain watershed. Excess phosphorus can cause algae blooms, reduce water clarity, create odor, and harm aquatic life, which reduce recreational use of the lake and impact tourism and the environment in the region.
“By providing development-stage financing to PurposeEnergy, Leyline is supporting an initiative that will not only allow PurposeEnergy to generate renewable energy for the Vermont grid, but will benefit the entire St. Alban’s business community,” said Erik Lensch, CEO of Leyline.
PurposeEnergy will construct an anaerobic pre-treatment plant adjacent to the Ben & Jerry’s production site, which will be connected via a buried three-inch pipe that will receive Ben & Jerry’s byproducts for treatment, eliminating the need for hundreds of waste tanker trucks each year. In order to maximize power output from the digesters, PurposeEnergy will blend other feedstocks, including de-packaged food waste, chocolate, and cheese byproducts, with the ice cream. As a result, other businesses in the community can also use the digesters to process their byproducts, while saving money and reducing their carbon footprint.
“PurposeEnergy hopes to revolutionize the way food and beverage production facilities process, utilize, and reclaim organic waste,” said Eric Fitch, founder and CEO of PurposeEnergy. “We are grateful that Leyline provided us with the critical capital we needed to get this project started, as well as the guidance we needed to initiate the SAINT project and help Ben & Jerry’s manage its byproducts in a sustainable way.”
PurposeEnergy has developed and trademarked a Tribid-Bioreactor, an anaerobic digester that metabolizes organic waste streams into biogas, and which it bills as “the highest-efficiency methane conversion digester on the planet.”
Earlier this year, Leyline initiated a partnership with Momentum Energy Storage Partners, an energy storage developer in Columbus, Ohio, to develop numerous renewwable energy projects across the U.S., including initiatives underway with the Pennsylvania, Jersey and Maryland Power Pool (PJM) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) regions.
