LEARN-3: Bastiaan Teune

I'm not expert on sustainable energy, so I'll try to write from my limited knowledge on one of biogas hero whose work in Vietnam was once published in Thailand's media. Biogas is an untapped rich sources of renewable energy that Thailand had also explores as one of their focus for an alternative energy search.

Not only it is put "recycle" in it most practical application -- as any organic waste digestible by anaerob bacteria, can be converted to energy with biogas generator -- it is also relatively easy to deploy in community/households.

One of heroes in this biogas field is Bastian Teune, who had helped rural community around the world build their own sustainable biogas generator and help to reduce people's dependability to oil-based power electricity. Below is link to Bastian's profile to read more about his work.

http://www.snvworld.org/en/countries/vietnam/advisors/Pages/Bastiaa...

Quoting from Bastian's article on Vietnam's Biogas program he worked on, Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), one of the agreements of the Kyoto Protocol, was actually opens the opportunity to capitalize on green house gas emission reduction where investment on biogas would provide both environmental and financial incentives for country who adopts it.

On a carbon market, developing countries can sell their quantity of green house gas emission reduction (Certified Emission Reductions) and generate revenues. If that revenues is reinvested further to biogas, it will generate more revenues under this scheme, and act like a compound interests. Bastiaan's work in Nepal has already managed to secure their CERs and the Vietnam programme is on its way to acquire CERs as well.

For me, such scheme that Bastiaan has worked on is just what we need to build a case for providing community with cheap and sustainable energy. I myself can see how Bastiaan work can be rolled out to Indonesian's millions of villages and change their dependency to conventional coal/petroleoum based power supply.