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While environmentally friendly energy sources are often considered expensive, five university students are setting out to prove that green energy can not only be dirt cheap, but also profitable.

The scheme cooked up by the seniors at Yogyakarta’s Gadjah Mada University (UGM) involves cow dung — a whole village full of it.

In their submission for July’s National Science Week contest, the students proposed getting an entire village to process cow dung and siphon off the resulting biogas to use as fuel for cooking stoves.

Wijaya, one of the students, says that while communal projects to generate biogas are not new, this project is unique in that it encourages villagers to sell excess gas for a profit.

“Not only do they learn how to use it, but they also earn money from it,” he says.

In the final of the National Science Week contest in Bali, the concept won the gold medal, and efforts to actualize the project soon began. The team received Rp 7 million ($777) from the National Education Ministry to start exploring its idea.

Now, Wijaya says the group has found the perfect test site — Ngemplak village in Boyolali, Central Java, which is surrounded by a cluster of other villages.

“The village is strategically located,” he says. “Our hope is that from there, the use of biogas will spread to surrounding villages.”

Wijaya says the idea for the project came from a concern that forests in the area were being stripped bare by villagers searching for firewood.

“A single family can go through 15 kilograms of firewood a day just for cooking, so imagine how many trees get cut down each year,” he says.

The biogas is generated from a slush of cow dung, water and probiotics — ingredients that boost bacterial growth — which are mixed together in a special vat called a digester. A tube then carries off the methane that is produced.

The UGM students have already built and sold digesters to 17 families in the village. “Each digester cost Rp 600,000 to make, but we split it 50-50 with the villagers,” Wijaya says.

He adds that they initially ran into resistance from the villagers, who were not familiar with the technology. “We got a few rejections at first,” Wijaya says. “Not everyone is willing to change the way they do certain things, such as cooking.”

So Wijaya and his team introduced the entrepreneurial angle, teaching villagers to build their own digesters and sell the excess biogas to neighboring villages.

Siska Aditya, another member of the UGM team, says they are now preparing to present the idea at an international conference on sustainable community service in Japan, as well as at an environmental seminar in Sweden in November.