By Kari Williamson

GreenWatt designs, operates and builds turnkey biogas plants creating renewable heat and power from biodegradable high water content wastes without depending on the addition of slurry.

The technology is particularly suitable for energy recovery from organic wastes and residues from agriculture and the food industry at the site of their origin.

A financing round of €6 million is planned to finance GreenWatt's international growth.

Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, CEO RWE Innogy, says: "The distributed renewable production of energy will become increasingly important with the restructuring of the energy supply – therefore we have decided to support GreenWatt. This innovative biogas technology has already been successfully adopted by several customers and, with the additional benefit of avoiding waste disposal costs, these plants are an economically attractive alternative for the agriculture and food industries."

The biogas technology developed by GreenWatt involves multi-stage digestion in the absence of oxygen. The plants provide the conditions for a flexible digestion of organic waste materials without the addition of animal manure and using an especially high water content substrate, making the technology suitable for food industry sites.

Furthermore, the process residues can be used as bio-fertiliser.

Target customers are mainly agricultural operators, food manufacturers, the food trade and sustainable biomass producers.