Establishment of biogas based electricity plants in the poultry farms reduces dependency on fossil fuel used forerunning captive generators. This also ensures bio-security and proper litter management in these farms. Moreover, slurry produced in the digesters as byproduct is a good bio-fertilizer.

According to the Livestock Department, currently there are more than 150,000 poultry farms in Bangladesh with about 1,500 farms having more than 20,000 birds population. So, Bangladesh has good potential for biogas based electricity projects.

IDCOL has so far financed 9 biogas based power plants, the largest one having a capacity of 400kW. IDCOL has a target to finance 140 such projects with an average capacity of 50 kW by 2018. The World Bank, KfW, USAID and JICA are providing support to IDCOL for these projects.

Since Bangladesh is an agricultural country and rice is one of the main agricultural products, rice husk is abundant in the country. Bangladesh produces about 6 million tons of rice husk a year from about 30 million tons of paddy. Approximately 4 million tons of rice husk are being used for rice parboiling, domestic cooking, poultry and fish feed etc.

Using gasification technology, rice husk can be used to generate producer gas, which can then be used to run gas generators for electricity production. Furthermore, the by-products of the gasification process can also be used to generate other valuable chemicals such as precipitated silica, calcium carbonate as well as activated carbon. IDCOL has already financed two rice husk based biomass gasification projects: a 250 kW in Gazipur, and another 400 kW one in Thakurgaon.

Power supply is an ongoing challenge for the telecom operators as many of the remote areas are not connected to the national grid. In off-grid areas, diesel generators are used to source the required power which requires periodical refueling and frequent maintenance and are subject to fuel price hike. This in turn has forced operators to choose alternative energy solutions, especially solar power. To provide uninterrupted voice and data services, a number of operators have decided to run off-grid BTSs with solar-diesel hybrid power system. These systems use solar PV as primary power source and diesel generator as backup.

So far IDCOL has financed 138 such solar-diesel hybrid power solutions in the telecom sector.

IDCOL has contributed significantly in the development of local manufacturing/assembling facilities for solar batteries, charge controllers, inverters, etc. However, the country was lacking a solar PV manufacturing/assembling plant and had been importing its entire demand mostly from India, Japan and China. To make the country self-sufficient in SHS technology and ensure reliable supply of solar modules at affordable cost, IDCOL published RFP on 6 October 2009 for setting up solar PV module assembling/manufacturing facilities in Bangladesh. In response IDCOL received 23 proposals and after extensive due diligence financed 2 PV assembling plants with a combined capacity of 10 MW.

The Government of Bangladesh has set a target to ensure 10% of its electricity generation from renewable sources by 2021. The Government is now focused on development of utility scale solar power generation and has targeted to award grid-tied solar power projects to the private sector with capacities of 2000 MW by 31 December 2018 under Speedy Supply of Power and Energy (Special Provision) Act 2010. The capacity of such projects will range between 5-100 MW with few of the projects being up to 200 MW. IDCOL plans to finance at least 300 MW equivalent grid-tied solar power projects by 2019.

IDCOL is also exploring to finance other renewable energy projects i.e. solar-powered transportation, rooftop solar system, solar cold storage and dryers, battery charging stations, community biogas projects, wind turbines etc.