Toronto-area company StormFisher Biogas has partnered up with Ontario winemaker Inniskillin on a venture that will see the seeds and skins of grapes — basically the by-product of winemaking — collected and processed in an anaerobic digester that will produce methane fuel. That renewable fuel will be burned in turbines to generate electricity, presumably to be sold into the Ontario grid through the standard offer program for 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. Vincor Canada, the parent company of Inniskillin, says the winemaker produces up to 2,000 tonnes of grape by-product annually.

StormFisher also has a partnership with Gordon Food Service Canada, a unit of North America’s largest privately held food distributor, which will have its food by-products converted to methane gas for power generation. Another partnership with Gencor Foods will see beef processing by-products generating electricity.

“Electricity producted from biogas brings about the dual benefit of inhibiting the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times as potent as carbon dioxide — into the atmosphere while displacing energy production from non-renewable sources like coal,” according to a company background document.

StormFisher says it will develop 15 megawatts of generating capacity in its first five years — a modest goal, but certainly a model that could easily be replicated across Ontario and the rest of the country as other provinces introduce their own standard offer programs, which is inevitable.

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