At the University of Life Sciences "King Mihai I" in Timișoara, Romania, three things happen on the same patch of ground. The campus farm produces a steady stream of animal waste and crop residues. The academic buildings get through roughly 1,848 MWh of electricity a year. And the rooftops sit in the sun, doing nothing in particular. Most institutions would treat those as three separate facts, filed under three different budgets. The RES-CIRCULAR project treats them as one system, where the output of each part becomes the input of the next.

The whole thing started as a question. What if you designed a site's energy around everything it already produces, instead of buying in whatever it happens to lack?

What they built

The answer is a combined heat and power system, paired with solar, both built on campus. Combined heat and power means a single setup that makes electricity and useful heat at the same time, from the same fuel, so far less energy is thrown away than when you produce each one separately. On one side sits a 100 kW biogas plant. On the other, a 150 kW array of solar panels. The university believes it is the first arrangement of its kind at a Romanian higher-education institution.

This was no weekend project. Funded by Norway Grants under the Energy Programme in Romania, with a grant covering half the cost, it ran from December 2020 to May 2025, moving through feasibility, permitting, procurement, and construction to a system that now runs every day.

The biogas plant is the clever half. The farm's animal waste and crop leftovers go into a sealed tank, where bacteria break them down with no air present. As they feed, they give off a gas a lot like the natural gas in a kitchen hob, and the plant burns it in two engines, its cogeneration units, to make power and heat.

What it produces

At full output, those engines generate around 2,400 kWh of electricity a day, a similar amount of heat for the buildings, and a residue that comes out as organic fertiliser and goes straight back onto the farm's fields. The solar panels add up to around 900 kWh on a bright day. Put a full year together, with the weather, the maintenance, and the rhythm of the farm all factored in, and the system produces roughly 825 MWh of electricity. That covers about 40% of everything the campus uses. The project estimates it avoids around 2,400 tonnes of CO2 a year.

Why biogas and solar belong together

Pairing the two is the entire point, not a happy accident. Solar gives you power when the weather decides: it drops the moment a cloud rolls in and vanishes after sunset. Biogas gives you power when you decide. The gas can be stored and burned on demand, so it fills the exact gaps the panels leave behind. Teodor Vintilă of the university puts it neatly: "Biomass is everywhere and is the greenest battery storing solar energy." A battery is a fair way to picture it. The sun's energy is captured by the crops, held in the waste, and released as electricity whenever the campus calls for it, including the hours when the panels are dark.

This is the same problem the national grid is wrestling with, only at campus scale. As more power comes from wind and solar, something has to cover the moments the wind drops and the sun sets. Most suppliers cover it by buying on the wholesale market at the priciest moment of the day, which is a big reason gas prices still set the price of electricity. Reserving real, on-demand power ahead of time is one way to fill those gaps without the last-minute premium. RES-CIRCULAR runs its own small version of that, by keeping a source it can switch on the moment the panels go quiet.

Closing the loop

Trace the circle and nothing useful escapes it. The farm's waste feeds the plant. The plant powers and heats the buildings. The fertiliser returns to the fields, where it helps grow the next crop, which in time feeds the plant again. The fuel is on-site, the energy stays on-site, and the only things crossing the boundary are the ones that genuinely have to.

Built to be copied

RES-CIRCULAR was designed from the start to be repeatable. The university describes it as a pilot for farms, councils, community groups, and other public bodies to learn from. That ambition holds up for a simple reason: the system is already running, where students and researchers can measure it in real time and visiting institutions can come and watch it work. On this campus, the students learning about the circular economy sit in buildings that run on one.

That mix of theory and working proof is why the project stands out. RES-CIRCULAR is a finalist for Micro and Small Scale On-Farm AD of the Year at the 2026 AD & Biogas Industry Awards, in a category tem sponsors. The winners are announced on 8 July in Birmingham. Whatever the judges decide, the plant runs again the next morning, turning waste and sunlight into about 40% of the power the campus needs.