KALISARI, Indonesia—In a dark and steamy room in Indonesia’s tofu heartland three men sweat over bubbling cauldrons, churning creamy beancurd witah wooden paddles before draining it by hand and slicing it into silky cubes.
Tofu has been cooked this way for generations but today, innovative villagers on Java island are producing something extra from the simple soybean cheap, renewable energy, piped directly into their homes.
Around 150 small tofu businesses in Kalisari village, many run from the family home, are benefiting from a pioneering green scheme that converts wastewater from their production floors into a clean-burning biogas.
Where families once relied on sporadic deliveries of tanked gas or wood for stoves, tofu producers like Waroh can access this cleaner fuel anytime with the flick of a switch.
“The advantages are huge, because we produce the gas with waste,” Waroh, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, told AFP as he boiled tea over a steady blue flame coming from his kitchen stove.
Experts say harnessing power from unconventional sources like tofu holds enormous potential in Indonesia, a vast energy-hungry nation heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
Renewable energy accounts for just a fraction of the power generated across Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of more than 17,000 islands with around 250 million people.
But the government has committed to curbing Indonesia’s greenhouse gases it is one of the world’s top emitters and wants a quarter of the country’s energy to be derived from renewables by 2025.
Small-scale projects alone won’t meet this target, but they are making a contribution.
While most renewable energy projects use traditional sources of power such as solar or wind, the Kalisari initiative is among a handful taking a more original approach. Other projects include generating energy from sorghum production, and also from pig waste.
In Kalisari, villagers sometimes wait weeks for LPG gas tanks to arrive. Delays due to poor logistics and bad roads are common in Indonesia, especially on overcrowded Java.
“One month you had it, another one you didn’t. Thanks to this biogas, things are a lot easier for people here,” Waroh said, as he ground soybeans through an ancient, spluttering machine.