Prison waste cuts costs in Rwanda

NSINDA PRISON, Rwanda - A prisoner ignites a faint blue flame under one of 10 massive stoves in a prison kitchen in eastern Rwanda to start preparing a maize and bean lunch for the inmates.

Once powered by costly, environmentally damaging firewood, the kitchen in Nsinda prison now runs on a free, renewable resource - the waste from nearly 8,000 inmates, and manure from cows.

Rwanda has installed biogas plants in all 14 of its prisons, one small part of the central African nation's plan to use renewable energy rather than the charcoal and firewood that provides 85 percent of its energy needs.

It plans to take biogas into Rwandan homes, where just 14 percent of the population currently has access to electricity, the Energy Ministry says.

"Before using biogas, we were using 1 billion Rwandan francs ($1.7 million) to buy firewood each year. After using biogas, we have reduced that amount by 85 percent," said Emmanuel Ndori, director of biogas production in Rwanda's prisons.

While firewood is still used to provide a quarter of prisons' power needs, there are plans to replace that with peat stoves in all Rwandan prisons in the near future.

"By 2013, there will be no firewood in prisons," he said. Biogas is a mix of methane and carbon dioxide from the fermentation of food, agriculture and animal waste that can be turned into electricity and heat.

Rwanda plans to generate 1,000 megawatts of power by 2020, largely from hydroelectric power, methane gas extraction and renewables, such as biogas.

Investors are also showing an interest. In September, Egypt's Orascom Construction Industries announced plans to invest up to $130 million in Rwanda in the next three to four years to build a methane power plant to produce 50 megawatts.

Renewable energy such as solar, geothermal and biogas are seen as a pragmatic solution for a country which lacks a power infrastructure and has no natural oil or gas reserves.

Installed capacity was just 69 megawatts at the end of 2009. This is expected to rise to 130 megawatts by the end of 2012.

At the Nsinda prison, it's lunch time. A team of eight inmates, dressed in orange and pink uniforms, carry a hand-made wooden rack, laden with a huge vat of boiled maize, back inside the prison walls.

The biogas kitchen is smoke free, unlike the choking wood fire smog of the prison's other firewood-powered kitchen.

The prisoners' diet of cassava porridge, maize and beans is not rich enough to create premium quality biogas. So waste from Nsinda's toilets is mixed with cow dung and water.

The combined waste is filtered before arriving in a series of 12, 100-cubic-meter digesters where the gas is created and stored, before it is used in the kitchen.

Reuters