The ISABEL project and how to promote local waste treatment, energy generation and food production through biogas systems

The ISABEL project is all about promoting, supporting and developing community biogas in Europe. In this talk I will give an overview of the project, its initial results and possible future activities.
  
In particular I will introduce two aspects related to the decentralized approach to waste, energy and food that ISABEL is supporting, namely the importance of scale and the opportunity for open innovation platforms. The issue of scale versus innovation is common across infrastructure projects: infrastructure benefits from increasing returns to scale but suffer from slow turnover and reduced flexibility and adaptation to change. I will comment on how these aspects are important when considering the decentralized approach of ISABEL and how they can be incorporated into evaluation and appraisal methods.
 
Open innovation is required to improve the coordination of private, public and civil society actors, especially for small and micro scale biogas systems, for which at the moment there is not yet an established market. A shared road map of innovation is needed to develop the required enabling technologies: it could lead to a modular, standard, inter-connectable, easy deployable set of equipment, which can be re-configured for each context. The development of an open source design of the biogas system could act as a commons around which a community and new businesses could be established, with local entrepreneurs creating value by adding services on top of the commons, such as assembly, operation, maintenance.