Report Rumah Energi

Indonesia gets slowly an industrial country and the standard of the daily life of the habitants
gets higher. Everybody uses more technic and needs more energy. It is important for me to
help the people using renewable energy instead of fossil materials, to make them not
repeating the faults Europe done with coal and nuclear power plants. So we can all work
together to reduce our greenhouse emissions and save the world from the climate change.

Therefore I spend my practical semester at Rumah Energi. A NGO, which works for BIRU,
‘Biogas Rumah’. The goal of both is to help people in rural areas to build their own biogas
plant, to produce out of their animal waste biogas for cooking and a better fertilizer for their
fields. I stay in the office in Klaten, because the area is with the big city Yogyakarta, wide
and diverse, so I can see many interesting things. To make more experiences and to see
more from Rumah Energi, the organization enabled me a two-weeks-trip to the office in
Mataram at Lombok.

Lombok has a different landscape and a different geographical location than Jawa,
especially with much more and bigger earthquakes. Hence the office has to work with
different conditions. I accompanied Pak Umar and Pak Krisna two weeks, to see how they
work, to learn something new and to give my advice to them. So I can combine it with
everything I learned in Yogyakarta.

The main part of the work is established at the fields: training for the new owners, inspection
of new biogas plants and inspection of old ones, whether everything is working fine. The
most used digester is designed by BIRU. It is simple and gets build with the cheapest
material, cement. The cement digester is under the ground, therefore it is cool and really
stabile and survives even the big earthquakes at Lombok. But for that simple material and
construction the price is too high. Scientist are working at an optimized digester but that will
not change the price problem for poor people at rural areas. It was great to see that people
at Lombok with destroyed houses as consequence of the big earthquake in summer, still
have the ability to cook and have light when the energy system was shut down. It was great
for me to experience, that a biogas plant not only means a good reason for our environment
and a better fertilizer for the farmer. With Rumah Energi I learned that a biogas plant means
better health conditions for the owner, instead of using fire wood, it means a stabile power
supply during extreme conditions and it means independence.

The BIRU digester is simple and sufficient, but still too expansive for poor people. Money
cannot get saved up at the material costs, because cement is the cheapest, so promotions
and subventions are necessary to make it available for everyone. The fluent system makes
more sense than a batch method and the construction is smart according to the hot
temperature and the earthquakes in Indonesia. The relationship between the office
employees and the biogas owners is trustful and always friendly, but Rumah Energi needs
more events to get more attention because the work they do is important.