A practical biogas based energy neutral home system for rural communities of Bangladesh
Growing demand of energy consumption, subsequent increase in energy generation costs, and increased greenhouse gas(GHG) emissions, as well as global warming from the conventional energy sources, encourages interest worldwide to bring a higher percentage of renewable energy sources such as biogas into the energy mix to build a climate friendly environment for the future. Moreover, due to high investment and maintenance costs, governments are not providing enough support for grid extension and delivering electricity to remote locations or rural areas, in particular, in under developing countries like Bangladesh. Therefore, this paper presents an Energy Neutral Home System (ENHS) that can meet all its energy requirements from low cost, locally available, nonpolluting biogas generated from animal waste, in particular, chicken and cow manure. The proposed ENHS has been developed for rural community, typically an area of 200 families, and will not only provide cooking gas and sustainable and affordable power supply to the community with low emissions, but will also facilitate high quality fertilizer for agricultural purposes. In depth analysis clearly demonstrates that the proposed ENHS not only offers electricity and cooking gas to the community with the lowest costs, but also reduces the energy crisis and GHG emissions and can play an active role in developing socio economic infrastructure of rural communities in Bangladesh in many ways.