Description

Learn about how biogas digesters can sell electricity back to the Chinese city's power grids.

Transcript

How Bio Gas Digesters Can Sell Energy Back Host: Today waste from the farm's animals, which include 1,000 head of cattle flows into 27 large biogas digesters. Together they produce about 2000 cubic meters of gas each day. Some of it is used to cook lunch for Dong Yuan's 300 staff. But most of it is used for another purpose. It's being used to produce electricity. Costing about $162,000 US dollars, engineers here built the first biogas- fuelled electric generator in the province. Capable of producing as much as one million kilowatt hours of electricity each year, Huang Bing Quan estimates he will have paid off his initial investment in just over two years through energy cost savings. Huang Bingquan: The biogas pits we built solved the pollution problem we had from the wine factory. It provided fuel for our staff canteen, electricity for our factory operation and helped improve the surrounding environment in our community. As a result our costs have dropped and our profits are higher. Host: But Huang thinks his profits can be even higher. Over the next few years he'll be adding 10,000 head of cattle and wants to generate enough electricity to sell to 200,000 people. Huang Bingquan: I really think this is a good model. You could think of us as a pollution treatment factory that provides energy, protects the environment and offers employment. Host: Imagine thousands of large farms with biogas-fuelled generators producing electricity for millions of people. That's the sort of future that the head of China's biogas society hopes for. Li Jingming: I am confident that more and more large farms will use biogas to generate electricity for urban and rural residents. I'm sure of it. And all this production will ease local energy scarcities and broaden the prospects for biogas development throughout China. Host: By 2020, China's central government wants 15% of the country's energy consumption to come from renewable sources like biogas and even the poorest farmers are being called upon to help reach the goal. In the village of Fada, Mayor Lu Gui Hong, welcomes a group of farmers bussed in from a nearby county. The government is promoting Fada's success as a new socialist village and educational tours like this are instrumental in encouraging more farmers to build biogas digesters. In Guangxi, there are now three million biogas tanks in operation, according to the government, making the province the largest producer of biogas in China if not the world. As each one routes animal and human waste into biogas digesters they not only prevent vast amounts of methane from escaping into the atmosphere but an estimated eight million tons of standard coal and 13 million tons of firewood from being burned each year, according to IFAD. Zhang Mingpei: Forest coverage in Guangxi is now 70%, which is ranked ahead of all provinces in China. When you visit Guangxi you see trees, green mountains and clean rivers, flowers and birds everywhere. Guangxi is now a beautiful province and biogas has contributed foremost to this. Host: As the rainy season begins in West Guangxi, Liu Chun Xian no longer worries about finding dry wood or venturing out in the bad weather. China's central government wants to have 50 million households, a population the size of France and Germany producing biogas by the end of the decade. It's hard to predict what impact so many farmers might have in reducing China's greenhouse gas emissions or in generating energy. But for rural families like this one, it's proof of what a simple technology can do to improve lives.