| Power from waste
flexibility in handling varying waste types and guaranteed operational availability. This has made moving grate WtE facilities the preferred technology choice for developers and funders of these plants, enabling them to raise the finances necessary to build more such plants. Over many decades, moving grate WtE plants have proven to be highly durable, and have excellent operational and safety records. This also ensures they provide customers and operational teams with reliable and predictable maintenance schedules and dependable baseload energy outputs.
The KVA Thun waste to energy plant, Switzerland
wastes into a variety of natural environments including landfill sites, forests, rivers and the open oceans. Today, this is now seen by many governments around the world as unsustainable. International scientific research has proven it to cause untold environmental damage for future generations, all our global environments and continents – including in the Arctic and Antarctic. However, despite the growing body of scientific evidence, many countries continue to opt to infill any voids available in former quarries, low grade land or natural ground level depressions as large- scale repositories for waste.
By burying material that nearly every human contributes to, the issue of dealing with the ‘refuse of life’ was to put it into landfill where it is then ‘out of sight and out of mind.’ Sadly, according to the World Bank, the practice of landfilling is responsible for about 11% of global methane emissions, produced when organic matter breaks down, creating one of the most aggressive greenhouse gases. However, whilst landfilling was the solution of choice for many centuries around the world, other countries are restricted or restrained by their natural geography and topography. For example, excavations in low lying countries such as the Netherlands would quickly hit water, making landfill unfeasible, whilst mountainous nations (such as Switzerland) find their landscape unsuitable or cost prohibitive for landfill sites. In the 1800s and 1900s, this led to the first commercially sized ‘combustors’, which could burn residual wastes. Whilst these early commercial incinerators were rudimentary by most modern design metrics, they provided a means for waste to be burnt to relieve the mounting civic and public health demands on growing, urbanised societies caused by the waste they produced.
Although early ‘combustors’ reduced the mass of solid waste by 80%-85%, there was little or no pre-sorting of waste before burning. Environmental controls and the monitoring of gaseous outputs were also less stringent at best (when compared with today’s advanced
standards), or non-existent at worst. The combustors of yesteryear admitted all types of waste; non-hazardous, hazardous, bulky and potentially recyclable materials were all ‘treated’ without the need to keep reliable records or origin information on the waste types and volumes. Inevitably, the uncontrolled emissions produced posed major health risks for plant workers, local communities and the wider environment. A better technology solution was needed.
Accelerating the development of WtE technologies
The age of highly designed WtE plants had begun. Tested for robustness and built with proven technologies from the 1960s onwards, more modern WtE plants were now capable of converting the heat produced into electrical energy and/or steam which could be used to power, warm and cool nearby homes and businesses.
In the ensuing decades, these plants went through many design updates and technology iterations, advancing them to be able to safely treat more types of waste, with far greater emission control and more effective flue gas abatement systems.
Today’s WtE facilities can even produce renewable gas and many other benefits, which are now helping to improve our collective environments and combat climate change. Technical innovation, combined with new environmental protection laws and regulation, led the way to today’s highly engineered moving grate WtE facilities. These plants now incorporate significant advances in flue gas cleaning systems, which efficiently scrub noxious post-combustion gases to ensure that each facility fully complies with all applicable operating and environmental requirements around the world. Moving grate WtE technology has enjoyed exponential growth across the globe. There are multiple drivers behind this demand, but some pre-eminent reasons are based around the moving grate plant’s robust track record,
All told, this makes moving grate WtE technology far more ‘bankable’ than alternative thermal treatment technologies. Many of these alternative thermal treatment technologies have struggled with the technical challenges of upscaling to become commercially viable and reliably capable of treating the shear variety of waste types needing to be processed. These drivers have seen moving grate WtE facilities become firmly established as the ‘technology of choice’ around the world.
Fit for the future
Kanadevia Inova is, and intends to remain, at the forefront of advanced WtE technologies that meet and exceed the client’s technical expectations, designing and building plants that are fit for the future.
Today’s WtE plants enable residual waste to be used as a fuel for generating large amounts of electricity and/or heat, while metals left after the treatment process, both ferrous and non-ferrous, are recovered efficiently for later reuse. As well as designing, building and operating new WtE facilities, Kanadevia Inova is also involved in the retrofitting of enhanced flue gas treatment technology and carbon capture
Example of advanced moving grate, as employed in the Newhurst energy recovery facility in Leicestershire, England (2022)
www.modernpowersystems.com | October 2024 | 17
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