The Polish Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Jan Krzysztof Ardanowski says that the recently presented government plan for the development of biogas plant energy could become a new source of income for small Polish farms.
By processing the available agricultural biomass from the Polish countryside, nearly 8 billion cubic meters of biogas could be produced annually. EU subsidies will soon become available for the development and construction of such biogas plants.
According to the minister, such plants can become part of the 'energy transition,' the shift towards environmentally friendly and sustainable energy generation. At the moment, coal-fired power plants are still widely used in Poland, and many stoves in the Polish countryside are still fueled by coal.
Currently, there are already just over a hundred biogas plants in Poland that process agricultural production waste. Biogas plants can be built on both public and private land. The Ministry of Agriculture wants to adjust regulations to strengthen these kinds of investments. This way, small Polish farmers in rural areas can form energy cooperatives and become 'suppliers' of natural raw materials for such gasifiers.
These are biogas plants that produce methane gas for supply to gas networks for private households and not – as is mostly the case nowadays – only as a raw material for power plants. PGNiG, Poland’s largest gas and oil company, has already shown interest in collaborating with Polish farmers as suppliers of raw materials.
However, Minister Ardanowski made the caveat that the development of such a program requires capital support. Although rural areas have great resources useful for renewable energy, they lack money.
"If we solve this problem, the energy distributed in rural areas will become an important energy source for our country," said the minister, pointing to domestic and EU funding sources for such projects.
Besides biogas plants, the so-called small wind energy and photovoltaic solar energy, Ardanowski also encouraged at a meeting in Karpacz to develop – as he put it – 'collective prosperity' by establishing energy cooperatives and energy clusters.