TheOff-Grid Biogas project is a collaborative effort to assess the feasibility of whether palm oil mill waste, and especially palm oil mill effluent (POME), can be used to support biogas-based mini-grids to serve the energy needs of remote unelectrified communities in Sabah’s palm oil belt while also mitigating methane, a greenhouse gas (GHG) that is 86 times more potent than CO2 over a20-year period. The project is implemented by the members of the Sabah Renewable Energy Rural Electrification (RE2) Consortium including Forever Sabah, Tonibung, PACOS, ENACT and Green Empowerment, working together with the Energy Commission of Sabah (ECoS) and private sector. Through a combination of GIS analysis, community engagement, mill surveys and engagement, financial modeling, and generative discussions across sectors, the project will assess the feasibility of technically, financially and institutionally viable off-grid biogas mini-grids in Sabah’s palm oil belt.

The first phase of the work involves desktop geospatial analysis to overlay the potential energy supply (estimated based on mills’ fresh fruit bunch (FFB) and POME production) and nearby villages’ electricity demand to assess total resource availability and demand, evaluate opportunities for rural electrification,and identify a shortlist of priority mill-village clusters (each cluster consistsof a mill and its neighboring unelectrified villages that could be served usinga local distribution grid). The cluster prioritization reflects selection criteria developed by the Consortium around electrification attributes, village spatial information, community organizing capacity, status of methane capture facilities, geographic and other considerations. These clusters allow targeted outreach, collaboration, and study efforts.

The cluster prioritization analysis will be strengthened, checked and deepened through ground truthing with local communities who live within the cluster and lack electricity access, and through surveys, interviews and discussions with the mills. This includes conducting processes of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) with the communities to inform them and seek permission to advance the project through a collaborative approach between the mill, the RE2 Consortium, and the communities. Consortium partners will perform local energy needs assessments to identify the communities’ current and aspirational energy needs, assess interest and readiness levels, and understand their vision for their future development. Complementing this approach, through site visits and surveys of the mills we will gain knowledge of mills’ current operational and waste practices, opportunities and challenge for methane mitigation and biogas capture, as well as understand their perceived challenges and motivations in business models for off-grid biogas capture energy access and begin to unravel previous challenges and complexities that have thwarted waste-to-energy (WTE) efforts as we seek to build new models that are collaborative and viable for the mills and all partners involved.

Mill surveys and interviews will underlie a co-design process of the mini-grid delivery models, including modeling the mini-grids’ financial performance under various financial and revenue stream scenarios – including electricity tariffs, carbon credits, and/or distributed renewable energy credits (DREC). We will also examine the institutional arrangements around ownership and long-termmanagement, operations and maintenance of the mini-grids. These models will be developed through an iterative process of input and feedback from partners including through workshops to bring together all the partners–mills, communities, smallholders, technology creatives and others–to provide feedback and refinements to the models so that they are realistic in light of local operating practices and on-the-ground realities.

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