Apr 7 2011
WELTEC BIOPOWER GmbH is establishing its second biogas plant in Latvia in Limbaži, a city located about 50 miles north of Riga. The EU-subsidised 500 kW plant with its fermenter of 3,500 cubic metres will feed in power starting from July 2011. The final storage tank has a capacity of about 6,000 cubic metres. Plans for expanding the plant with another fermenter are already under way.
The 88 cubic metres stainless-steel storage tank is heated. Two 250 kW gas-powered engines will produce biogas for 8,000 hours a year. The input material to be fermented will include 3,500 t of cattle manure, 1,900 t of cow dung, 500 t of whole plant silage, 300 t of grass silage, and 7,000 t of maize silage. The combined heat and power concept comprises the heat supply of the close-by agricultural buildings. The investor is the vice-president of the Latvian biogas association.
To a certain extent, the growing interest in German biogas technology in the Baltic states is driven by the need to gain independence from Russian natural gas. Therefore, the first step towards decentralised energy supply was made in 2008, when the Latvians started replacing inefficient co-generation plants with high transport losses with smaller district co-generation plants.
Limbaži is a suitable location, as the former Hanseatic city with its population of about 10,000 is the centre of the administrative district of the same name and one of the main areas of agriculture and processing of agricultural products. Apart from the advantages of German high-end technology, the German-Latvian cooperation has an interesting linguistic feature: both languages use the same word for biomass: „Biomasse“.