A co-digestion plant was losing 4% per bolus and could not see it.
Each feed event leaked a few percent. Nothing in the daily report ever added them up.
TL;DR
- A five-day cogenerator service and a recurring feedstock effect looked identical on the monthly average — Claritix Fusion told them apart.
- Each high-organic food-waste bolus cost about 4% of biogas for roughly three days before recovering to baseline.
- €44k a year surfaced once the loss was isolated and counted — the fix is operational, not capital.
The most durable losses are the ones sized just below the threshold of anyone caring. Four percent of one bolus is noise. Four percent of every bolus, every day, for a year, is a line item.
Two signals, one timeline
A monthly report had already logged this as an unremarkable average: a soft month for biogas, one number, no cause. Claritix Fusion fused feedstock loads, biogas, electricity, and the operators' own shift notes onto a single timeline, and two different things came apart. A five-day cogenerator service correctly explained the deepest drop, and underneath it sat something else: every high-organic food-waste bolus shaved about 4% off biogas for roughly three days before the plant recovered to its ~10,600 Smc/d baseline.
The largest bolus fell inside the service window, and its true cost could not even be seen without the fused view. A monthly KPI books the outage and the feedstock dips as one unremarkable average, from which you either miss the recurring feedstock cost entirely, or wrongly blame the digester for a planned maintenance stop.
What surfacing it was worth
- ~4% lost per high-organic bolus, roughly three days to recover each time.
- ~150 MWh a year unrealized, about €44k at the plant's power price.
- The fix is operational — cap or split large boluses — not a new chemical or new equipment.
Worth saying plainly: this one is a measurement result, not a recovery yet. Knowing the two causes apart is what makes the next conversation about the fix a short one, instead of an argument about which system is broken.
