Yogyakarta 04/12/2018

Report Rumah Energi Lombok

9.11 – 26.11.2018

Lombok is a beautiful green island in Nusa Tenggara Barat with a high biodiversity. In
Mataram, the capital of Lombok, an office of Rumah Energi settled down. With the target
to preserve the rare landscape and to support habitants with their financing of energy
and fertilizer with biogas.

The office accompanies the owner the long way, start from giving the first information’s
about biogas and biogas plants, to the training how to build and operate a plant, to the
construction of the right digester, the use over years until the end of the biogas plant.

Rumah Energi shares the office with a project group from Ford Foundation which has the
goal to support women at Lombok to start their own business. Ibu Uminingsih works also
close with Rumah Energi whenever it is possible. She has a big interest in the recycling of
plastic trash and offers a training about the environmental problem with plastic and how
to recycle it. Furthermore, she has her own biogas plant and a big composter for organic
waste.

The goal of the office is to build biogas plants. We can save our finite natural gas
resources with using biogas instead of fossil gas. The earth cannot produce the same
amount of gas and oil as we need at the moment, so at any day the resources are empty.
Therefore we need an alternative to produce energy. Furthermore, the animal waste
produces a lot of methane CH4, if it is just laying around and gets used as fertilizer at the
field. CH4 is a greenhouse gas which speeding up the process of climate warming.
Greenhouse gases are natural ingredients of our atmosphere. They are absorbing
heating waves from the earth. Normally the heat gets submitted to the space, but
because we produce too much greenhouse gases like CH4 and CO2 the heat gets also
submitted back to the earth. The result is the climate warning. During the process in the
BIRU biogas digester, a lot of chemical gases getting out of the animal waste and can be
used as flammable ‘biogas’ for heating or lighting, while the odorless bio slurry can be
used as fertilizer. The bio slurry is a much better fertilizer than the animal waste before
and contains less chemical substrates which are harmful for the environment. All in all,
the use of a biogas plant is cheaper for the owner because he has not to buy
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compressed fossil gas, reduces the use of fertilizer and helps to save the earth with a
reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Beside the biogas plants, the Rumah Energi
office in Lombok tries to sensitize the habitants of the island for the problem of plastic
trash in cooperation with Ibu Uminingsih. Plastic is produced out of fossil oil, which is a
final resource. Moreover, the most of our plastic trash gets into the sea and a plastic
bottle takes over 450 years to be mined in the sea. That means we have big mountains
of plastic in our ocean, which destroys the habitat of a lot of animal species. Mataram
has a worse plastic trash problem than other big cities at other islands. The plastic is
nearly everywhere, not only at the street or trash banks, you can also find it beside and
inside the rivers or in the middle of the forest. The Rumah Energi office Lombok, supports
the people in rural areas to get cheaper energy and fertilizer and it supports the
environment. Two important areas at the society in Indonesia nowadays.

During my visit at Lombok, I have seen the great teamwork in the Rumah Energi office
and also a great collaboration with Ibu Uminingsih and the Ford Foundation group. The
climate at the office motivates to ask, learn and work. I have seen the biogas plant at Ibu
Uminingsih’s house. Pak Krisna told me, that they fed the digester with the dung of ten
cows and the organic waste of the household, but the cows get stolen. So now they have
to buy cow waste to feed the plant. The next plant I visited was at a school in Lombok
Tengah. Some windows at the school where missing, the walls had a lot of cracks and in
the meeting room the roof gets repaired. Everywhere were still impacts of the earthquake
from August, except at the biogas plant. One BIRU digester was working like nothing has
happened and the second digester (fiber) was out of work but not destroyed. In the
second week, we visited Lombok Timur. The house of the family from one plant was
destroyed as consequence from the earthquake. It still had not a single window and the
walls had big holes, not only cracks. Their biogas had not even a crack and was running
perfectly. So the only working place at this house was the kitchen with the biogas oven.
Beside some other normal working biogas plants, I could take part at a biogas training in
Lombok Timur. It was interesting how the Rumah Energi employees explain the matter as
simple as possible and try to make the people interesting in the topic.

The Rumah Energi office Lombok is working efficiently, has a friendly and open minded
working climate and gets faced with some more extreme situations because of the
natural conditions at the island. They are working motivated and close together.
According to the high interest and their confrontations with new and extreme situations, I
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think it would be an advantage for everybody to give the employees the chance to further
education. For example with scientific articles and books or the visit of congresses about
biogas. I think they have a potential to be more creative in new work.

Vanessa Wilk,

German internship student ‘Renewable Energy’ Hochschule Rottenburg