Cracking Open the Biogas Black Box
By Jelte Harnmeijer, Co-Founder at Inclusive Energy.
An edited version of this article was published in Biogas, Edition 21, October 2022 and is available here.
Anyone reading this publication will already know that biodigestors provide a promising way for billions of households to access clean fuel for cooking, lighting and refrigeration, as well as high-quality fertiliser (bioslurry) for agriculture. However, the vast majority of digesters remain an opaque 'Black Box' to the families that rely on them. To open access and give end users the information and tools they need to make informed choices, an Anglo-Indian company called Inclusive Energy has just released a dedicated mobile app that finally allows end-users to engage directly with biodigestor performance: gas fill level, leakage issues, money saved (in LPG terms, for example), pressure, consumption, flow ... with more features to come.
Introduction
We started Inclusive Energy, an international smart-meter technology provider for biogas and solar companies, in India and the UK in 2018. Back then, we made the strategic decision to place key value chain actors – installers, manufacturers, NGOs, public sector entities, Government programs and so on – front and center within our value proposition. Practically all our technology development in the biogas space in the intervening four years aimed to answer the question: “we have developed a remote smart meter for biodigestors. What will biogas intermediaries do with it, and what kind of features can we bring them?” Industry insiders will not be surprised to learn that our initial attention focused on helping our B2B customers lower biodigestor running costs, enable more accurate and flexible ways to charge end-users, and unlock carbon finance. B2B services, in other words. What was missing, however, was a suite of features that would make biodigestors more enticing to the people that ultimately use them.
In early 2022, we were finally able to turn our R&D efforts to the actual end-users of biodigestors. Was there anything we could do to bring a step-change improvement to the way households, farms and other biodigestor owners interact with their systems? We knew from long experience that the vast majority of biodigestors out there are a ‘Black Box’ – no instrumentation, no dashboard, no user interface or display, usually not even a simple pressure gauge to be seen. When I try to explain just how serious this handicap is to non-industry professionals, I ask them to imagine trying to optimise their driving performance in a car that has no fuel gauge, speedometer, or instruments of any kind. That is the current reality of operating and maintaining a biodigestor for most today.
Our team also suspected that this Black Box issue was a major reason why biogas – despite its long-standing promise of delivering clean, safe, affordable and climate-friendly energy – was still growing in meagre single digits (steady ~7% global annual growth or so over the past decade) when other renewable technologies like solar PV were mushrooming at high double digits (>30% annual growth in some markets). Not only that, but we also have reason to believe that the large abandonment rates we were seeing in places like East Africa (with many users opting to stop using their biodigestors altogether) could be resolved if biodigestor owners could easily track even the most basic performance metrics of their systems.
The problem of enabling evidence-based feedback between end-users and their biogas systems is actually not as trivial as it may seem. If it was, the problem could have been solved long ago. Consider the seemingly simple challenge of measuring biogas pressure. Although biogas-compatible variants do exist, most so-called aneroid gauges (that is, meters not making use of fluid columns) rely on flexing metallic elements to do their job, and these readily corrode under sustained exposure to the brutal chemistry of biogas. Hydrostatic gauges, meanwhile, often have greater life expectancy but are cumbersome and exhibit terrible dynamic response. Similar serious challenges vex most flow meters.
Our biogas meter, called ‘Smart Biogas’, makes use of a patented design to sidestep many of the fluid condensation and corrosion challenges that plague previous metering solutions. Following several years of field testing and released in 2021, Smart Biogas units are now successfully monitoring biodigestors in over a dozen countries and counting.
In other words, increasing number of biodigestors worldwide already have data streams capturing performance metrics covering the gamut from system pressure through flow rates, consumption and leakage. But this data was flowing to directly to our business customers. How to get this data to the end-users themselves, and in a way that adds genuine value?
Introducing SB Home – a dedicated mobile app for biogas end-users
We are excited to announce that our web application for our Smart Biogas business customers has now been complemented with a free mobile application specifically crafted for biogas end-users
The answer, of course, is a mobile phone app. From market research in East Africa and elsewhere, we knew that 70-80% of the owners of Smart Biogas-connected biodigestors had phones capable of running Android or iOS apps. We also knew that language, literacy and IT skills varied hugely across the biodigestor customer base. What was needed for the very first version, we decided, was a friendly, easy-to-understand App that most people with a smart phone would be able to use, but would also cover the bases of digestor fill level, digestor value-for-money, and customer billing (how much was still owed to pay off a digestor). After half a year of software development and internal testing, it was time to give our brand-new ‘SB Home’ app the first run for its money (‘SB’ stands for ‘Smart Biogas’). And what better place to do this than Indonesia? With its vibrant biogas sector and largely non-English-speaking population, this huge and diverse south-east Asian archipelago should provide some indication of the future prospects for SB Home.
Our technical team visited half a dozen districts spread across two disparate islands over the course of July and early August 2022 and visited 40 biodigestor end-users. Of these, all but 2 (that is, 95%) owned an iOS or Android phone that could run our fledgling SB Home app. That’s a good start. We were further encouraged when all 38 of these end-users enthusiastically downloaded the App. But would they actually use it? To check, we closely monitored the usage of the App after it was installed. The graph below shows the results all the way up to the date that this article was written.
With steady or even increasing usage of the App over time, the data so far exceeds expectations, and has motivated us to start planning an SB Home rollout in other geographies. Put loosely, the most basic version of our App is being used between 20 and 60 times every day, with no discernable drop off. Needless to say, our team will be working hard to increase this already promising baseline by continuous release of new features. Multi-language support, leakage alerts, and AI-driven usage optimization suggestions will only be the beginning.
A certain resignation seems to have long overshadowed our sector: that small-scale biogas is and always will be a black box. We believe that it’s high time to dispel this shadow, and that digitisation holds the key to the market’s growth. If this turns out to be true, it would mean that we are currently only scratching the surface of the value creation opportunities that would exist if we crack open the black-box once and for all.
If the problems and solutions in this short article resonate with you, do please get in touch with us!
To learn more about Inclusive Energy, the Smart Biogas smart meter, or the SB Home mobile app, check out the links below.
Links & Resources
A bit about Inclusive Energy: https://inclusive.energy
Inclusive Energy company video: https://youtu.be/I-CHmuH90Tk
‘SB Home’ mobile app for end user walkthrough video: https://youtu.be/EYR9up25e0U
Smart Biogas™ software-for-business walkthrough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrtfg9Tyw0w
Smart Biogas™ animation: https://youtu.be/zTXF5bV-hws
