AKHALDABA (Georgia): Zhuzhuna Didebashvili is dreaming about warmth, hot tea, cheap power and most specifically about cow dung. The 46-year-old farmer from the tiny mountain village of Akhaldaba thinks cows could be the secure energy source that will protect Georgians from the whims of the global gas market.
“Every morning, before I go to work on my farm, I boil tea or milk on this gas stove, and it all comes from the cows I keep,” she said, pointing to a pipe connecting her stove to an underground tank where she dumps her cow dung.
By vigorously churning the tank every day, she helps the noxious mixture rot and produce the methane that heats her tea.
The gas helps to keep her immune from the energy shortages that have plagued the small Caucasus nation since the end of the Soviet Union, when Georgia was left without the capacity to supply itself with power.
Most Georgians cannot afford to supplement their energy supply with expensive power imports from Russia and Armenia.
Didebashvili’s 62-year-old neighbour Elisabed has only three cows but, enthused by her neighbour’s example, built herself a stove that now helps her keep up her supply of jam.
Only around 140 Georgian households use cow-powered stoves. But for those families it has been a major innovation that makes gas cooking easy in places too remote for a steady supply.
Nine households in Akhaldaba — a village 25 km (16 miles) from the capital Tbilisi where the power station was long ago looted in the post-Soviet chaos — get gas from their cows. The others have to depend on firewood for cooking and heat.
“In the past I needed two trucks of firewood for heating and cooking, now I need only one truck,” Elisabed told Reuters.
Didebashvili dreams of owning enough cows to power a generator, but appreciates this might be a long way off.
“This is only a dream. In order to get electricity, perhaps I would need a hundred cows, I would have to become a true farmer,” she said.
For her gas she can thank Avtandil Bitsadze, an engineer who lost his job in a factory with the economic collapse that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and invented the stoves as a way around the country’s periodic energy crises.
He has even won World Bank support for his plants, which cost about $2,000 to construct.
“I built the first power plants in 1994. Demand for such plants emerged in Western Georgia, where peasants keep more cows than in the east,” Bitsadze said, saying he took the idea from similar plants in Britain and China.
“I didn’t invent this device, I just adapted it for the cooler Georgian climate,” Bitsadze said.
His plants can be extended to allow farmers to heat their houses, although that would require at least 15-20 cows.
“This is very a easy way to get energy. Gas can be produced from anything that rots, but this gas is much purer than natural gas, for example, from Azerbaijan,” Bitsadze said.—Reuters
