Villages turn to bamboo as source of safe, green power

CUTTING through the glassy water of a mangrove-fringed inlet on the east coast of Indonesia’s Siberut island, Mateus Sabojiat and Anjelina Sadodolu arrived home by canoe to Saliguma village.

Back in their house, Sadodolu lit a wood fire to boil water before her husband left for work at the local government office.

“The electric power is on only when it’s time to sleep,” she said.

The couple in their forties, who have six children, live just a few hundred metres from Indonesia’s first power plant designed to be fuelled by bamboo, one of three such facilities built to bring electricity to isolated villages in Siberut.

Three years after construction, the Saliguma biomass power plant supplies energy to some of its residents only between 6pm and midnight, not using bamboo as planned.

Due to problems with the plant’s battery and key equipment since September, it runs on diesel, which provides a more stable but dirtier power, until early April. Ongoing repairs mean it still uses a combination of diesel and wood.

Rural communities in Indonesia have harvested bamboo for food, fuel and shelter for centuries.

Forestry scientists say bamboo’s attributes, including its ability to grow rapidly even in barren soil, could bring economic breakthroughs in isolated areas while curbing planet-warming emissions and providing energy.

“It’s a beautiful kind of vegetation,” said Marcel Silvius of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), an inter-governmental organisation that helps developing countries implement climate action.

“It has significant root mass, and channels carbon and water back into the ground,” he said.

A 2018 paper published in the journal Sustainability showed that bamboo has high energy value and can sequester as much, or more, carbon than many other fast-growing tree species.

Forestry scientists and environmentalists envisage a green circular economy where communities plant bamboo seedlings on unproductive land, then receive both income and affordable, clean energy from the biomass they sell to local power plants.