Generating Electricity from Sorghum stalks

The sorghum stalks, which can be around 6 foot long, are chopped up into inch long pieces and fed into a fire tube boiler to generate electricity. The electricity can then be used locally to power the mill, a surrounding village, or sold to the national grid. The cost of producing the energy is a maximum of six pence per kilowatt, while more expensive than fossil fuels, it is cheaper than many other alternative fuels and helps with the government's commitment to the Kyoto protocol.

Sorghum Energy designs and builds the biomass power generation equipment, which can burn most forms of biomass, including sorghum, miscanthas and all straws. The advantage of using sorghum over a standard straw is the size of the sorghum stalk, several times the size of normal straw crops grown in the UK. This means that more fuel is produced per acre, which reduces the cost of the entire growing and power generation process.

Using biomass for generating power is, of course, greenhouse gas neutral; only releasing the gasses that the plant absorbed whilst growing. The use of sorghum is a very environmentally friendly way of generating power; it is renewable and does not add to the greenhouse gas problem of the planet.