Waste Energy
Waste energy is a market opportunity that is largely untapped. With growing populations, increased public awareness and federal incentives, waste management presents an exciting set of new opportunities: increasing waste management revenues per ton and a 30% investment grant on top of projects that already offer relatively higher ROIs.
These factors, coupled with the general lack of financing, mean companies and projects with privileged access to more sophisticated, deep-pocketed investors can currently generate superior returns: the kind that can't be achieved when markets are efficient.
The IEA’s baseline Reference scenario sees cumulative energy investment of US$ 26.3 trillion between now and 2030. This includes cumulative renewable energy investment of US$ 5.5 trillion, of which US$ 3.3 trillion is for electricity generation – equivalent to US$ 229 billion a year for renewable energy, 60% of it for electricity generation.
In the United States, 87 waste-to-energy plants dispose of more than 90,000 tons of trash each day while generating enough clean energy to supply about 2.5GW of electricity to approximately two million homes. Every ton of MSW processed in a WTE facility avoids the mining of one third ton of coal (9.6 million tons per year) or the importation of one barrel of oil (29 million barrels per year). As our nation begins to focus on conservation and renewables, WTE has already proved to be a reliable technology.
In contrast to what was happening in the U.S., hundreds of new WTE facilities were built in the European Union, Japan, China, and over thirty other nations where land-filling is regarded as environmentally undesirable and energy- and land-wasteful. In fact, in the years 2000-2007, the global WTE capacity grew at the rate of about four million tons each year.
The ABC of Waste Energy (Read more »)
The ABC of Waste Energy
The two proven means for disposal are burying MSW in landfills or combusting it in specially designed chambers at high temperatures, thereby reducing it to one-tenth of its original volume. The heat generated by combustion can be converted into steam which flows through a turbine, generating electricity. This process is called waste-to-energy (WTE). It converts the energy from combustion of MSW to electricity and recovers and recycles the metals contained in the MSW, while the remaining ash is either used in landfills for daily cover and landfill roads or cleaned up and used offsite for other construction purposes (as is done now in the EU and Japan).
It is important to note that an Energy from Waste plant (EfW) should not be seen primarily as a waste treatment plant but more accurately as a power station or even a Combined Heat and Power station. A thermal EfW plant, in particular, ‘treats’ waste in the same way that a coal-fired power station ‘treats’ coal. EfW can be used with many different types of waste such as domestic, commercial, industrial, construction / demolition, sewage and agricultural etc. The only criterion is that the waste fraction is combustible and/or biodegradable. Any other benefit, such as volumetric reduction, is a useful by-product but is not the primary purpose of an EfW plant.