Prospect of Biogas & Biomass as Potential Sources of Renewable Energy in Bangladesh Md. Shafayat Hossain, Mohammad Wahidur Rahman, Ahmedullah Aziz & Farseem Mannan Mohammedy Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Dhaka, Bangladesh Abstract—Bangladesh, not being bestowed with fossil fuels is compelled to rely on renewable energy sources. Despite having potentiality as sustainable energy sources, due to the lack of proper planning, biogas and biomass contribution to master plan by Bangladesh government of having 5% of total generation from renewable energy sources will be insufficient. Even IDCOL, the leading contributor in this field is struggling to keep up with their envisioned target of 37,269 Biogas plants within Dec. 2012 as their trend of installment estimate only 29,320 plants at end of year 2012. By 2015, if their current scheme sustains, only 3268 cubic meter per year for biogas will be produced and 14.5 million tons of coal equivalent for biomass generation will be insufficient comparing to demand of 66.46 million tons of coal equivalent. Trend analysis by means of least mean square algorithm is presented to show the demand-supply discrepancy up to 2015. I. INTRODUCTION Bangladesh, the country with the highest population density has growing demand for energy. Petrobangla, the state owned authority of coal and gas reserves, has confirmed that they can currently provide only 80% of today’s daily demand of 2500 million cubic feet gas [1].Without the introduction of renewable energy sources, the pressure on conventional fossil fuels will be so intense that unscrupulous exploitation of them may lead towards environmental degradation with massive destruction of forests and soaring amount of CO 2 emission. Despite having a handsome amount of fixed cost, renewable energy extraction plants like biogas plants are lucrative in the long run in sense of both time and money. Biogas, mainly composed of methane and CO 2 , has a huge potential in meeting up our demand for gas which may reduce the dependency on natural gas to a great extent. Biogas can be used to make electricity and meet up the power crisis in rural areas. Biomass can also be a solution to prevalent power crisis providing biofuels. Bangladesh is not enriched with fossil fuels. So, sooner or later, concentration has to be given on renewable energy sources. If proper planning is taken right now, it may be possible to catch up to the once seemingly possible goal of having 5% of total energy from renewable energy sources set by the Government of Bangladesh (GOB) in Power System Master Plan (PSMP). But, only 43,866 installed plants by 2011[2] and plans for expanding them are not sufficient. In this paper, the underlying limitations in planning and forecast and their aftermath are exposed with mathematical analysis. An intuitive policy design based on artificial intelligence is proposed. II. BIOGAS POTENTIAL IN BANGLADESH A. Potential Generation for Biogas Biogas generation is considered feasible if temperature is warm, feeding materials such as water, cattle dung and high quality construction materials are easily available; transporting construction materials is easy and human resource for plant construction is locally available. Looking into the above conditions, Bangladesh has higher prospects for the technology as it fulfills all of them. A survey [3] shows that, implementation of a biogas plant of volume 6m 3 with gas production of 100 cft costs 25,000 BDT while saving 4,947 BDT per household per year. Table 1 shows production of Dung, the major feeding material of Biogas plants in Bangladesh with estimated Biogas generation from it (considering 1 kg of dung can produce 0.037m 3 of biogas) for several years. Table 1. Potential of biogas generation [4]-[6] Year 2000 2003 2010 Cattle(million) 23.65 24.50 26.828 Goat(million) 33.80 34.50 16.242 Buffalo(million) 0.83 0.85 0.544 Sheep(million) 1.12 1.26 1.221 Bird (million) 200 153 154.715 Total dung (million tons/year) 79.84 80.67 83.58 Generation (million m 3 /year) 2954.413 2984.605 3092.645 Figure 1. Potential biogas generation Fig. 1 shows the trend of biogas generation up to 2015 and it will be about 3260 million m 3 per year on the basis of the availability of the sufficient dung estimated from the data in Table 1. B. Potential Demand for Biogas Biogas is mainly used by rural household. So, it can be assumed that demand for biogas is proportional to the number of rural households. Table 2 shows the Number of rural household for several years. Therefore estimation is made to trace the future trend in number of rural household as shown in Fig 2. Table 2. Number of rural household [7], [8] Year Number of rural household(million) 1996 08.440 2008 25.355 2009 28.712 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2900 3000 3100 3200 3300 Year Capability of Biogas generation(million m 3 /year)