In France, biogas plant manufacturer Weltec Biopower GmbH has started rolling out four agricultural biogas plant projects. The company has done this along with the partner Domaix Energie in Alsace, which is from Germany. The step is for Weltec's successful export strategy. Apart from agricultural substrates, the biogas plants, whose construction has already started, will use sludge and food leftovers.
This documents the trend that French biogas plants are increasingly fermenting industrial leftovers. Since the introduction of the separation and utilisation of kitchen waste from large catering establishments in France at the end of 2011, organic waste from schools and company cafeterias must be used for the production of energy.
Accordingly, WELTEC will integrate hygienisation units in order to utilise the substances of category 3 according to the EU directive. Another common feature concerns the use of the heat: In all four biogas plants, the residual heat will be used in a digestate dryer in order to reduce the amount of liquid manure and market the dried digestate.
Thanks to the heat utilisation concept, the four biogas plants have an efficiency of at least 70 percent, enabling the operators to benefit from the heat and power bonus, which is up to EUR 0.04/kWh in France.