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Waste to power Bangalore's street lights

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If all goes well, in four months, the BBMP will set up 16 biogas plants in various locations in the city, to produce 800 kilowatt of power from segregated organic waste, enough to power street lights in the areas.

One of the biogas units, installed by Mailhem Engineers Pvt Ltd, a Pune-based waste management firm, at Singapura Layout in Kuvempunagar ward, has begun functioning, and is powering 25 street lights for three to four hours.

“The capacity of this unit is five tonnes of segregated organic waste. As of now, this unit gets only two tonnes of waste. It will produce power to light the street lights for 8-10 hours per day if it gets five tonnes of waste,’’ said Nikhil Pinto of Mailhem. The company will install three more such units at Mathikere, Gandhinagar and Kempe Gowda Park on Sri Ramana Maharshi Road.

The civil work for the biogas units at Mathikere and Gandhinagar has been completed. The electric work has to be taken up. Mailhem hopes to commission the units in two months. The company is awaiting clearance from the BBMP to begin work on the unit at Kempe Gowda Park.

The BBMP has awarded the contract to install the units has to Mailhem and Ashoka Biogas on a design, built, operate and transfer (DBOT) basis. Mailhem has been contracted for four biogas units, and Ashoka Biogas will install units at 12 locations in the city.

The BBMP is spending Rs102.24 lakh (Rs79 lakh for construction and machinery and Rs23.24 lakh for maintenance of the biogas unit for three years).

Speaking with dna, MR Venkatesh, chief engineer, solid waste management, BBMP, said all efforts are being made to complete the remaining units before March 14, 2014.

“This initiative will reduce the load of garbage on landfills. We want to utilise the power generated by the proposed biogas unit near KR Market for powering street lights in and around the area,’’ Venkatesh said.

The second coming
Biogas was the buzzword during the 70’s and 80’s and under a government, Khadi and Village Industries commission (KVIC), assisted by voluntary agencies, installed three million units.

However, lack of feed, or digestate, have made msot of the units failure. Decline of cattle population and the social aversion to use human waste as biofeed, contributed to the failure of biogas experiment, while the constraints of design and technology in the units to clean the unit and dispose safely hydrogen sulphide that accumulates in the units too were responsible for the failure. However, with civic agencies looking at the possibility of hitting two birds with a stone, solving the waste problem and generating power, as also improvement in technology seems to have persuaded them to return to biogas.

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