Nitin Gadkari felicitates SAAF Energy for their Varanasi “Community Biogas Grid”

Pune based biogas project developer SAAF Energy has been conferred with the prestigious award for “Outstanding Community Based Green Energy Project” by the Indian Federation of Green Energy (IFGE). The award was conferred in a function held in New Delhi by Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Road & Transport, and Union Minister of State for Petroleum & Natural Gas Rameswar Teli in the presence of industry leaders and other high level officials.

The award was received by Harshad Kulkarni, Co-founder & CEO of SAAF Energy, and Aashish Dutt, Co-founder, SAAF Energy

Aashish Dutt said on receiving the prestigious award, “We dedicate this award to the Community at Akauni Village who welcomed one of India’s first & largest piped biogas ‘clean cooking’ networks powered by waste, and to our valued stakeholders & partners including. the local Dairy Farm, Social Alpha Sustain Plus Energy Foundation & National Dairy Development Board.”

He went on to add, “One village going ‘saaf’ at a time , only 599,999 potential biogas mini-grids to go; the ultimate ‘prize’ & true ‘reward’ would be to learn from, replicate & scale this with public-private partners across India and the developing world!”

The Akauni Village Biogas Mini-Grid

The biogas mini grid was developed by SAAF in the Akauni Village of  Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Its designed with a capacity for the intake of 3-4 TPD dairy manure and having a biogas generation potential of ~ 120 – 150 cu.m/day.

The importance of the community based biogas project is that it is connected with more than 100 Households via underground piped distribution system that would run about 3 to 4 km in total length in the entire village. As part of the entire system, every household has an individual meter and a biogas stove.

SAAF Energy said that each home is saving about one LPG cylinder per month and in return for the biogas pay-as-you-go service, they incur less than Rs 500/month based on actuals /metered gas consumption only. If they consume zero cu.m of biogas they pay zero rupees.

The entire Akauni Village pilot project is funded and operated by SAAF and financed by their donor partners. The community has incurred zero cost for infrastructure and equipment. “Next steps will be to scale up and work with the Agricultural Community on bioslurry “circular economies” to improve adoption & value of fermented organic manure for co-benefit to local farmers,” said Aashish Dutt.

He mentioned that the SAAF biogas micro-grid project comes under ‘clean cooking” and has synergies with schemes like Gobardhan, Ujjwala, Swacchh Bharat Abhiyan etc. and offers one of the highest carbon offset impacts per dollar as per Gold Standard.