There are more than 20 million small-scale urban biogas digesters in cities in China, and more than 2 million in cities in India. And now, thanks to our Solar CITIES associates and supporters we now have 8 in Egypt, 5 of them in some of the poorest sections of inner city Cairo.
O.K., comparatively speaking 8 is nothing.
But when one is measuring environmental progress at the household level it is hard to beat China and India — they’ve had government policies aimed at supporting “appropriate technology” for decades and their cultures contain an entrepreneurial spirit when it comes to enviro-tech that is hard to beat because the household demand in the face of poverty and environmental degradation is huge. A more fair comparison would be with the number of known urban household biodigesters in Germany: 1. It’s on our porch. And this is in a country that is one of the kings of biogas production (we should know — our neighbor in the next town, Imbrahm, has a 1 million Euro facility that processes all the restaurant waste from the surrounding cities to produce millions of Kw of electricity and hot water every year).
Small scale urban bio-digesters are uncommon in the “developed world” if they can be found at all (try to find one in America!). And in developing countries biogas facilities have been largely a rural phenomenon, relying on animal wastes. So 8 small-scale CITY digesters in Egypt appearing within the last 8 months isn’t such a bad figure when you consider that Egypt still faces the greatest barrier to the deployment and acceptance of renewable energy systems:
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