Biogas Flows Into Germany's Grid  

In my post on biogas a while back, I mentioned the ambitious plans being made in Germany to use biogas in their natural gas network. REW reports that this is now starting to become a reality, with concerns over global warming and Russian dominance of gas supplies sparking the change.

The biggest biogas plant in the world to feed gas directly into the national gas grid is set to go into operation in eastern Germany at the beginning of 2009.

The plant at Konnern will feed 15 million cubic meters (m³) of biomethane into the national grid for use by customers anywhere in Germany. Experts say it is the start of a boom in biogas as the country's energy providers increasingly look to home-produced biogas to reduce their dependence on natural gas imported from Russia.

In 2007, there were 1280 megawatts (MW) of installed biogas capacity and about 3,750 biogas plants in Germany. As much as 20 percent of Germany's natural gas needs could be supplied from biogas by 2020, according to Andrea Horbelt of the German Biogas Association.

Horbelt said that some studies predicted that Germany could even supply its entire natural gas needs using biogas if it were able to tap the agriculture potential of Eastern Europe with sufficient efficiency. But for now the focus is on exploiting the potential in Germany where a well-developed national grid facilitates biogas transport.

"Biogas is the market of the future because it allows energy to be produced and transported economically and in a decentralized way around the country," said Pivi Scamperle of agri.capital, the company that runs Germany's largest existing EU €10 million biogas plant, feeding 6 million m³ of biomethane into the national grid.

The boom in biogas comes thanks to a key technological breakthrough a year ago that allowed biogas to be injected into the natural gas grid and so transported around Germany economically, said Thomas Wilkens of WELtec BioPower, a company that manufactures biogas units.

Until that breakthrough, as much as two-thirds of all the energy produced by combined heat and power biogas plants couldn't be used because there was not enough demand for heat at the point of generation — usually in agricultural areas — and there was no technology available either to put the gas into a pipeline and bring it to customers in other places.

"Biogas from Konnern will go all around Germany through the national grid," Wilkens said. "There is a growing demand for plants like this because energy providers are eager to find a way of reducing Germany's dependence on expensive gas from Russia. Biogas could make a big contribution to energy self-sufficiency as well as to fighting global warming."