Smart Biogas 3: Digesting Data

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Smart Biogas (tm) is a patent pending, remote monitoring platform designed to monitor increasing numbers of geographically dispersed household/institutional biogas digesters at minimal cost across the world. Smart Biogas collects data on individual biogas digesters' performance and usage, allowing detection of potential faults or substandard installation/operation. This data is transmitted to a cloud platform where the data is, through this project, automatically processed and made intelligible to the user for, example through notifications, to facilitate prompt repairs or further user training. Hardware and software was designed and successfully piloted with Energy Catalyst Round 7 funding (No.105909) (EC7) .Over the course of EC7, we released a MVP (Minimum Viable Product/first release) of the metering hardware and web-application, and recorded over 55 million hourly reports on biogas performance from around the world and published two academic papers. This MVP product allowed the metering to happen and display the information in a web-application but, valuable and unique as that product already is, at this stage it does not add any additional intelligence to the data. This grant would allow us to develop a number of other features for commercial release including:* Enhanced analytics for preventive maintenance and diagnostics for biogas plants* Finalise Carbon Credit reporting* Enhanced sensing hardware to provide further data points* Robustness development of the existing product and for wider use cases including larger commercial digesters* Further academic papers and knowledge disseminationUltimately we seek to address financial barriers and operational inefficiencies enabling viable biogas-as-a-service commercial models, enhancing company operations and providing additional income streams. Smart Biogas provides a powerful tool that facilitates increased access to biogas technology for more people, especially the rural poor.The project is led by Inclusive Energy Ltd, with support from prominent actors in the biogas sector in East Africa, Kenya Biogas Program and Biogas Solutions Uganda, academic input from the University of Nottingham, and larger scale commercial pilots with Green Impact Technologies (Malawi) and Grassroots Energy (India).