The extremely energy efficient plant uses renewable raw materials and organic waste from the region to produce hot water and electricity through cogeneration. The plant cost €20 million, which was financed by BayWa AG, and is capable of processing more than 40,000 tonnes a year in waste from meat production in the region and another 53,000 tonnes of residual waste (slurry and manure, for instance) from neighbouring livestock and meat processing farms. In addition, around 18,000 tonnes of agricultural substrate is used as feedstock for the plant, which produces in excess of 12.5 million cubic meters of biogas.
The project is split into two locations which are connected through a four-kilometre long gas pipeline. Whereas the biogas plant has been built to the east of the City of Szarvas, the cogeneration plant, which produces electricity and hot water, is situated in the proximity of Gallicoop Zrt., one of Hungary's largest turkey meat processing companies.
The plant was opened in the presence of Mihály Babák, Mayor of the city of Szarvas; Klaus Peter Riedel, envoy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Hungary; László Domokos, President of the State Audit Office; Zsolt Gémesi, Head of the Renewable Energies Office of the Hungarian Ministry of Development; Roland Schuler, member of the Management Board of BayWa AG; and Erdélyi István, Gallicoop AG's General Manager.
Those present underscored the ground-breaking nature of the substrate concept and the fact that the plant's extremely high efficiency of 64 percent is unique in the Central European region for a plant of this kind.
The electricity produced can supply 18,000 inhabitants, which is around the size of a city such as Szarvas. The thermal energy, which is a by-product of electricity generation, is transformed into steam, cooling and hot water which is used directly on site in meat processing. Biogas is now used in place of more than one million cubic metres of natural gas a year. This also helps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 210,000 tons within 20 years.
The plant's control system, designed for optimum efficiency, feeds the power generated by biogas into the grid only when required, thereby tracking general demand for electricity. Szarvas therefore only feeds into the public grid at times of intermediate and peak loads and, when consumption is low, stores the biogas directly on site.
The substrate produced by fermentation in the plant is used as a high-quality organic fertiliser which can now replace artificial fertilisers on several thousand hectares of agricultural land in the environs.
r.e Bioenergie GmbH is a shareholding of BayWa r.e which, in turn, belongs to BayWa AG, an international trading and services group operating in the fields of agriculture, energy and building materials.
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