Since recent years agricultural as well as co-digestion biogas plants win worldwide more and more importance because of numerous advantages.In these plants biogas can be produced by using numerous different input substrates.But, concerning the equipment (e.g., machines, automation),most of the biogas plants are still low-tech plants.From the point of view of instrumentation, control and automation (ICA) most biogas plants are still black-box systems because on most existing plants only few process data are available.One of the problems of black-box systems is that it is not easy to analyze and optimize such plants.Consequently, practice shows that many plants run sub-optimally.Furthermore, for economic reasons many plants are operated in critical (load) ranges.I.e.there is a high danger of plant breakdown.As a result of these facts, the average plant efficiency of many biogas plants is rather low.Consequently, during the last few years, some modern biogas plants have been built, which are equipped with state of the art ICA equipment, reliable/adapted machineries and engines.In case of these grey-box systems, numerous process and status information are available, which can be used to realize high-level automation concepts.The operational results of this new plant generation show that plant efficiencies and engine utilization degrees of> 90 % can be reached.In this paper, the author will present some information for ICA (e.g., ORP, pH, electrical conductivity, gas flow rate, gas analyzer, near-infrared spectroscopy, video surveillance) on modem biogas plants and will discuss operational results.Furthermore, the author will give information on the driving forces for the use of ICA equipment as well as the challenges and opportunities, which result from an intensive use of ICA equipment on biogas plants.