The Hindu Business Line : Innovations in biogas

Sustainable energy is the focus of Ashden Awards (www.ashdenawards.org) . "At the heart of the Ashden Awards is an annual competition to identify and reward organisations which have carried out truly excellent, practical, yet innovative schemes, demonstrating sustainable energy in action at a local level," informs the site.

Interestingly, quite a few Indian organisations have won the award. For instance, in 2006, International Development Enterprises India won the first prize of £30,000 for its simple device that uses human power to pump water; the organisation `promoted and marketed over half a million treadle pumps to farmers in the plains of northern India'.

Appropriate Technology Institute too won the first prize, in the `food' category; it had designed `an innovative compact biogas system suited to urban households that uses food waste and other sugary, starchy substances rather than dung to produce gas for cooking'.

Winning the second prize of £10,000, along with institutions from Southern Africa, Cambodia, China and Sri Lanka, was Vivekananda Kendra (VK) from Kanyakumari. VK's NARDEP or Natural Resources Development Project has made `a series of advances to biogas designs which generate gas for cooking and have developed effective ways of using the slurry as a powerful fertiliser using a combination of new and traditional techniques,' acknowledges Ashden.

"The major bottleneck faced by the biogas technology, in its dissemination and integration, is the unfavourable cost-benefit analysis done in conventional manner," explains Mr G. Vasudeo, Secretary of VK- NARDEP, speaking to Business Line.

For example, a conventional study may conclude that in terms of quantifiable monetary benefits and costs, the biogas plant programme results in an annual monetary saving of Rs 12 crore as against the annual cost of Rs 15 crore, says Mr Vasudeo.

"If the analysis were to take into account the conservation of trees, externals such as pollution control, improvement in the health of people, use of biogas slurry as manure in replacement of energy intensive chemical fertilisers, improvement of soil quality by the use of biogas slurry application and so on, we would have a more complete picture," he reasons.

Apart from skewed economic analysis, biogas has also been at the receiving end on the policy front. "After studying biogas plants across India, VK-NARDEP identified various problems," notes the Ashden site. "Principally, the plants were often too large for their purpose (thanks to the subsidy system which rewards installers in accordance with size of the plant). This meant the users didn't have sufficient dung to fuel them so the plant failed - and therefore acted as a bad advertisement for biogas generally."

NARDEP's own innovative biogas plant design, called VINCAP, has a dome made not from bricks but `from bamboo, strengthened by steel bands and made gas-tight with a thin layer of plaster'. Construction costs have been cut, as a result, by around 12 to 20 per cent. A typical biogas plant costs between Rs 10,000 and Rs 35,000, but the savings pay back in one to three years. Queerly, however, the plant doesn't qualify for a government subsidy, notes Ashden.

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