Business plan tool for small biogas plants

Bio-energy production from waste and crops has long been recognised as a significant potential contributor to meeting future energy needs at a global scale. The use of biogas is not a new technology in Europe. Countries like Germany and Italy have thousands or hundreds of plants installed. Nowadays there is a reduction of economic benefit to adopting biogas plants to produce renewable energy due to the decrease of energy prices from fossil fuels and to the increasing use of the photovoltaic and wind energy sources. Furthermore, co-products utilised in the large scale biogas plants like maize, wheat, grass, etc. which can also be used as feed for animals have risen in price. For these reasons, the economic feasibility of large-scale co-digesting installations decreased dramatically in last years. The European project Bioenergy Farm II funded by EASME under the Intelligent Energy Europe program aimed to stimulate the realization of micro-scale biogas installations which mainly use own manure and feed left-overs from the farm as feedstock to producing electricity and heat with a CHP installation, gas upgrading for gas grid feed-in, producing heat in a biogas boiler and upgrading the biogas to a transport fuel.