The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has approved “Energy from Urban, Industrial and Agricultural Waste/Residue” programme with modified terms and conditions from 2017-18 to 2019-20.
The programme aims to promote installation of energy recovery projects from urban, industrial, and agricultural wastes to generate biogas, bioCNG, enriched biogas, power, as well as thermal energy. To this end, the program will create conductive conditions and environment to develop, demonstrate, and disseminate the utilisation of wastes and residues for energy recovery.
The programme will also promote biomass gasifier-based power plants for electricity generation to meet industrial captive power and thermal demands of industries such as of rice mills. In addition, the plants will provide electricity to small villages and hamlets for lighting, water pumping and running micro-enterprises.
Under the programme, a central financial assistance (CFA) will be given in the form of capital subsidy for setting up waste-based energy generation projects. The fund will also be provided for promotional activities such as research and development, resources assessment, technology upgradation, performance evaluation, etc. A total CFA of Rs 780 million has been assigned for projects that are set up under the programme between 2019 and 2020. The amount of capital subsidy to be disbursed will be calculated on the basis of installed project capacity and will be capped to a maximum of Rs 100 million per project.
The state nodal agencies will be provided an incentive/service charge at the rate of one per cent of the eligible CFA (maximum incentive of Rs 500,000 per project) to assist with project monitoring during implementation and post commissioning.
The time-period for project completion has been set as 24 months for waste to energy plants and 12 months for biomass gasifier plants. After the end of this time interval, the contracts will be cancelled and CFA claims will not be entertained.