Agricultural waste in sub-Saharan Africa has significant untapped potential for biogas production. Biogas technologies are being applied to the conversion of some of these wastes into clean renewable energy, but to date this has relied largely on first generation 'wet' anaerobic digestion (AD) systems with high capital and operational costs and high parasitic energy loads.

In this project, a consortium of leading experts outline to introduce innovative and efficient sequencing batch 'dry' AD system enabled by robust ancillary monitoring systems that will optimise the AD process. This will be supported in county with increased analytical capacity building that will support this project and the wider AD sector, addressing one of the key failure points for AD systems - lack of technical support.

This will provide a route to clean affordable energy in rural sub-Saharan Africa by utilising high dry matter and high cellulose wastes.

This novel approach is systematically designed to overcome the key barriers to adoption and sustainability of energy from waste fed AD systems; capital cost, complexity, operational cost and local capacity. The AD system will be designed as a flat pack system to be built in Kenya using local components for final installation. In the commercial phase this enables rapid roll out of the technology whilst the project developers ensure quality of build and IP.

The business model looks to provide value to wastes through heat and power generation, selling these services to the agro processing sector, that are coming under increasing legislation in terms of waste control whilst having intermittent power supply. Excess biogas will be dried and compressed and used in local communities for cooking, lighting and cooling. Digestate will be processed to a compost and reused back in agriculture.

The respective innovations will help to overcome the energy trilemma whilst providing commercial ecosystems services to business and communities.