Tihar Prisons has joined hands with Bhabha Atomic Research Centre to set up a bio-gas plant on its premises which will utilize the waste from its nine jails. This plant will help meeting the jail’s electricity needs.
Tihar houses nearly 12,000 prisoners in its nine jails and produces large amount of waste every day.
Usually Tihar is in the news for notorious reasons, and of later for housing not-so-nice VIPs. It is good that it is getting known for better reasons.
(Kitchen+human waste)==>Biogas==>Power, through anaerobic digestion is a fairly straightforward process. The economics of digester-based power is not, mind you, entirely clear if it is considered a pure case of power production. I’d say another way to look economics here would be to look at costs associated with disposal of these waste, and subtract these costs to the total costs of running the entire process.
I have a feeling that this could make the entire project look far more viable.