Renewable Energy Support Fund Projects

SUSTAINABILITY VICTORIA:  RENEWABLE ENERGY; DIAMOND ENERGY BIOGAS PLANTS IN SHEPPARTON AND TATURA VICTORIA TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO DURATION 7MIN 28SEC.

Anita Roper: Hi, I'm Anita Roper. I'm Chief Executive of Sustainability Victoria. We're an agency of the Victorian government. Welcome to the Web Cast.

Organic waste is one of the most immediate renewable energy resources at our disposal. Current technology allows the conversion of gas emissions from bio-waste into commercially viable electricity. Diamond Energy is a company leading the way in this technology in Victoria. It already has sites in Shepparton and Tatura, generating power into the main electricity grid. This is the story of how Diamond Energy and their partners, including Sustainability Victoria, turned biogas into a viable and important energy source for the Goulburn Valley region.

Tony Sennitt: We identified that there must be opportunities to put distributed generation into the marketplace. We then looked at what nodes were short of power in the marketplace - so we said, in Victoria, where can we put generators? Where are generators needed? We found pretty quickly that up around the Shepparton area was a place. Now, I actually went up to Shepparton, and said to the local business development officer, 'Where can we do things? You know, here's a point where a generator would make sense.' And he said, 'Well, if you're interested in building generators, Goulburn Valley Water has got some biogas that's available.'

Bruce Hammond: Goulburn Valley Water is centred around Shepparton. We look after an area of about 20,000 square kilometres in North-Central Victoria, basically from Cobram on the Murray down to the outskirts of Melbourne. We service a population of about 120,000 people, but we also service a lot of major food processing industries. For us, in the peak canning season if you like, in Shepparton for example, we see the loads on our wastewater treatment plants increase from say, 10 million litres per day up to about 30 million litres per day. But in addition to that, the concentration of the waste increases significantly as well. And that throws up a lot of challenges for us, in the treatment processes.

Back in 1999, we upgraded our Wastewater Management Facilities to deal with these challenging waste loads that we were experiencing.  That upgrade involved roofing lagoons, and turning them into anaerobic treatment lagoons. Basically that's just a treatment process that works in the absence of oxygen. A by-product of that process is methane, which is a valuable renewable energy resource. We monitored that process for several years to ensure that it was reliable - we were generating quite significant volumes of methane - and then we went out to expressions of interest, to interested parties, to see what they could do with it.

Tony Sennitt: So I sat down and did the economic modelling, and said, 'Okay, well, this is how I can value the gas, this is what we can work with within the renewable energy space', and obviously then started to understand what sort of funding was available, and put a presentation to Goulburn Valley Water.      

Bruce Hammond: Diamond Energy put in a submission. They were successful, and we've been partnering with Diamond Energy ever since to develop the Co-Generation projects at both Shepparton and Tatura.
Diamond Energy brought some innovative ideas to the project. One significant one was taking advantage of the capacity for us to store gas under our floating covers on the lagoons. As a result that meant that they could generate power when it was needed, and not when the gas was produced, and we saw that as a significant advantage in the project.

Tony Sennitt: The wastewater is fed into the lagoons - you know, keep the bugs in the dark and feed them...; it keeps them happy. And that process actually delivers biogas.
John Chiodo: Wastewater enters the treatment plant via the concrete head works there, flows via gravity into this covered and lined lagoon here, and then via a naturally occurring biological process generates methane-rich biogas. The biogas is collected via this pipe work here, and then fed into the generation unit over there. In the tall Scrubber to the left of our compound, you'll see that we are scrubbing out contaminants of concern, which may actually impact on the operation of the engine. Then from that point, the purified biogas is fed directly into the engine, where we generate electricity and feed it into the electricity grid.   

Tony Sennitt: We then choose when to run that biogas, and we align the running of our engines to when the electricity is needed in the grid. 

Converting the gas into electricity is actually fairly simple, in that there are some special engines that have been created in Germany, and a couple of other places around the world now, that will run on that gas. So, similar to a gas-fired engine, there's not a large amount of difference, it actually converts it  direct output into an alternator, through a transformer, into the grid.

Sustainability Victoria was very helpful, and the process that we went through obviously required the fact that we had the call on Government support - and I think that was very helpful, in getting us through to the position we got to.
We have a great relationship with Sustainability Victoria. That relationship has been built from - hopefully from - some of the things that we've done, which supports some of their programs, and more importantly the way their programs have supported us. 
In supporting us, what they have managed to do is around enabling us access within some of the government bureaucracy, enabling and giving us support in terms of financing, giving us support in terms of access to people, IP, the kind of things that a small business needs to get over the hurdles that we are inevitably faced with. You don't know what those hurdles are going to be until you front up each day, and I could give you a list of about 20 that we went through that we weren't expecting, and on many of those occasions, we approached Sustainability Victoria and we got some help and guidance in how to solve them.

Under the electricity market structure, the energy goes in at Shepparton, and it actually supports the local grid by giving it what they call 'reactive power', that's been put into the grid and supports the local grid from brown outs. So since we've come along with these two plants, although they're relatively small, they actually stabilise the local grid. Prior to the - I'm going to call it 'Anaerobic Digestion' - so, the covering of lagoons, these two plants probably produced in excessive of 100,000 tonnes of CO2 per year into the atmosphere. By the time the lagoons were covered, which Goulburn Valley Water did, and then by the time we added our generators to it, we went from 100,000 tonnes to probably a net effect of about minus 5,000 tonnes. So, a significant change in the environmental footprint.

Renewable energy is about investing now and reaping the rewards later.