The world today is rapidly producing and trashing waste, even while this waste
has the potential of being utilized. India discovered the utility of waste quite
early in the day. Bovine waste has always been looked upon as are source with
something for everyone, especially in a traditional rural family that depended
upon cultivation for sustenance.
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| A biogas cookstove in use in a rural
kitchen |
To waste or not to waste
TERI undertook the task to widen the applications of biogas in a rural set-up
while keeping in mind several challenges like the lack of infrastructure, easy
maintenance, and so on. The team from TERI fine-tuned biogas-plant technology
and introduced a spherical type fixed-dome biogas plant to ensure that not an
iota of energy is wasted when working with waste. The spherical shape of the
plant merges the digestion and gas storage spaces to a single dimension, making
their construction far easier. It also minimizes the surface area for a given
volume, thereby reducing cost while increasing the gas production rate.
Despite the thousands of conventional biogas plants that have mushroomed across
hundreds of villages in north and central India (where cattle rearing is a way
of life and therefore cow dung is aplenty) over the last few decades, they either
failed to draw crowds or to keep them there. The largest drawback of this conventional
set-up is its prohibitive cost. The not-too-perfect design of the plant and
the sub-optimal outputs are the other serious handicaps. The plants break down
frequently, maintenance is cumbersome, and repairs are few and far between.
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| A fixed-dome biogas plant in the backyard of
a house |
New and improved
TERI used the expertise of its researchers to improvise the design of the biogas
plant and create a leak-proof and spherical fixed-dome plant with a digester-cum-gas
storage facility. The first such plant was installed and monitored in the village
of Dhanawas, in the state of Haryana. The plants have been designed for high
efficiency and low maintenance. The spherical-type fixed-dome biogas plant easily
meets the cooking, lighting, and power generation needs of a rural family in
India. Even the waste from the biogas plant could be utilized as rich, nutritious
manure—an added bonus or most rural families in India as they have agriculture
as their mainstay.
Beneficiaries
The success of the pilot plant encouraged TERI
to set up five more plants in Dhanawas village. These were closely monitored
for 3–5 years to confirm the performance and sustainability of operations.
The results were exceptionally good and proved to be a reiteration of the earlier
achievement. Subsequently, another 173 TERI-modelled biogas plants have been
installed in 46 villages across seven states in India. Installed in rural areas,
the plants are like manna from heaven in that they efficiently meet all the
domestic requirements of rural families. In fact, the success rate of the plant
is 100%.
Applications/benefits
The upgraded design of TERI’s biogas plant has demonstrated how
apt and ideal this technology is for rural India—it is based on renewable
energy, has low running cost, is cost-effective, and energy-efficient. The family-size
biogas plant (with a capacity of 2 cubic metres) costs 9000 rupees. The other
welcome change it has brought in rural living is the job opportunities it has
created. That’s a world of difference.
