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Thursday, January 30, 2025

Clean Energy & Pork Production at Milford, Utah

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There is a strange confluence of clean energy and pork production near Milford, Utah, 208 miles south of Salt Lake City, and 30 miles west of Beaver.

Located there, just north of Milford in Beaver County, is the largest solar farm in Utah. It is the Escalante Solar Project, which has a capacity of 315 megawatts. Also at that location is the largest capacity wind farm in Utah, Milford Wind. Milford Wind has 300 megawatts of capacity from 165 turbines just to the east of the solar farm.

Ironically, until recently, almost a million hogs were raised near Milford, with 26 hog-raising facilities interleaved with the turbines of Milford Wind. This confluence is illustrated in the top photo and the photo below, followed by a figure. There are also another approximately 50 hog-raising facilities located south of Milford. However, due to reduction in pork demand, Smithfield Foods Inc. has terminated its contracts with many of the hog-raising farms near Milford. It remains to be seen whether other buyers can be found or whether these farms will need to shut down.

As mentioned previously, this confluence is also illustrated in the next photo, showing one row of solar panels in the foreground with a group of four hog farm sheds just behind. Further back you see numerous wind turbines as well as additional groups of four hog farm sheds in the distant background.

You wouldn’t be surprised to see hog farm facilities in Iowa, which is the largest producer of pork in the US. Iowa is practically one immense corn field, so there is plenty of food for the hogs. How do they feed the hogs in Utah? Utah produces adequate corn and wheat to feed the hogs in nearby irrigated fields. Early Mormon pioneers irrigated their fields with water from mountain streams. However, a large fraction of irrigation today, particularly in the Milford area, comes from water pumped from underground aquifers. This is called water mining, since there is not enough water from rainfall in the current climate to replenish the aquifer. As time goes on, water is extracted from the aquifer and has to be pumped from further and further below the surface, thus the electricity used for pumping is continually increasing. Also, eventually the aquifers will run dry. Fortunately, there is plenty of low-cost electricity to run the pumps from the nearby solar and wind fields.

Wind farm, solar farm and hog farm sheds. Milford, Utah. Photo by Fritz Hasler

This confluence is also dramatically illustrated in the Google Maps satellite section in the figure below. Google calls these satellite views. However, often these views are produced from aircraft image mosaics. The solar panels in the Escalante 3 Solar Plant can be seen on the left. In the center you can see lines of wind turbine shadows from Milford Wind running from northwest to southeast. Interspersed you can see the hog farm sheds in groups of four next to a rectangular food storage area and a square black liquid waste disposal lagoon.

Solar farm on the left, wind farm turbine shadows, and hog farm facilities center right. Milford, Utah. Extracted January 23, 2025 from Google Maps.

Each unit of the Milford hog farms consists of the following: 1) Four long sheds to house the hogs where they are fed. 2) A rectangular area covered by plastic, which I assume is used for food storage. 3) A square lagoon used to store liquid waste. The liquid waste is then turned into organic manure. In the photo below, you see an aerial view of one of the Milford hog farms with a row of wind turbines in the background. In the second image below, you see a ChatGPT generated version.

Aerial view of one of the Milford area hog farms with four sheds and a liquid waste lagoon. There is a row of wind turbines in the background.
Aerial view of a “Milford Area hog farm” with four sheds and liquid waste lagoons. ChatGPT-generated.

In the photo below, you can see one of the Milford Wind turbine lines. In the foreground you can see one row of solar panels from the Escalante Solar Project.

Line of wind turbines at Milford Wind. Milford, Utah. Photo by Fritz Hasler

In the photo below you can see some of the solar panels from the Escalante Solar Project north of Milford, Utah.

Solar panels at Escalante Solar Project, Milford, Utah. Photo by Fritz Hasler

In the photo at the beginning of this article, you see a heavily used double line of railroad tracks in the foreground. This is part of a major north-south freight thoroughfare running from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Los Angeles, California. While traveling east/west on I-80 and I-90 through Wyoming and South Dakota, you commonly see freight trains over one mile long, often pulled by three large dash-9 diesel locomotives with a single dash-9 diesel pushing from behind. In western Wyoming, the trains tend to be mixed freight, while in eastern Wyoming the trains are often unit coal trains (100% coal cars) moving high quality coal from Wyoming’s massive coal strip mines. Traveling north/south the length of Utah on I-15, you don’t see any railroad trains. The Utah north/south rail thoroughfare runs through Milford 30 miles west of I-15. In the photo below, you see part of a mixed freight train carrying oil and agriculture products going through Milford.

Freight train. Milford, Utah. Photo by Fritz Hasler

Clean Energy Production In East Central Utah

Utah solar power is set to increase dramatically with the construction of a 400-megawatt plant as part of the Green River Energy Center in east central Utah. There is also a 1600 MWh battery facility to be constructed at the site, making it one of the largest solar + storage facilities in the country. The Green River Energy Center is being constructed near Utah’s largest coal-powered electrical generating facilities, Hunter and Huntington. This will give the new energy center access to the transmission lines necessary to make it successful. The construction of the $1 billion facility is well underway and is planned to come online later this year. For comparison, the largest grid-scale battery storage facility in the world is the 3000 MWh installation in Moss Landing. California.



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