For a list of UK power stations I go to DESNZ's Digest of UK Energy Statistics (DUKES). DUKES is not very informative about EfW, showing only seven plants where the primary fuel is Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), a total of 471 MW of capacity. The largest plant here is Viridor's EfW in Runcorn at 91 MW. I know that there are a lot more out there, so I made my own estimate by looking at Veolia's website. Veolia burns around 2.5m tonnes of waste pa to generate 1,600 GWh - that's equivalent to 183 MW. As it claims to have almost a quarter of the UK market that makes the market around 830 MW. By comparison, DUKES contains 125 hydro stations totalling 1,466 MW (83 of these stations being 10 MW or less). It's been a few years since I looked at anaerobic digesters (ADs) and at that time we had 489 of them with a total capacity of 429 MW. We should have more now, so let's assume 500 MW from that fuel type. I find it useful to think of capacity in units of Hinkleys (H), where one H is the planned capacity of the Hinkley point C nuclear station. For on-demand renewables then we have:
That's around 1.1H of on-demand renewables in the estate, and we need at least another 8.2H to replace the gas. We also have 0.9H of pumped hydro, but this is storage - the electricity first has to be made somewhere else.
Here are some of the common responses when EfW comes up for discussion:
You wouldn't want to live next to [an EfW plant] no, neither would I. They don't have to be ugly however: Amager Bakke is an EfW plant visible from downtown Copenhagen. It was the World Building of the Year at the 2021 annual World Architecture Festival and comes with a dry ski slope, a hiking trail, and an 80m climbing wall.
They emit CO2 and quite a lot of CO2 for the amount of electricity they produce: but remember, this is really a waste management technology. A good percentage (half ?) of that CO2 is from biofuel - paper and card - and the rest is fossil from plastics. There are pilot CCS projects announced that would capture CO2 from the incinerator plume and send it for storage - CCS could make EfW (and other biomass plants) carbon negative, one day.
They emit other nasty stuff but EfW is monitored and regulated - limits were set by the EU Waste Incineration Directive and subsequent Industrial Emissions Directive. A widely-reported statement from the Environment Agency says ‘during the Millennial celebrations in London the emissions from one 35-ton firework display equalled 120 years of dioxin emissions from the SELCHP waste incinerator’ and that ‘in a year, the whole Energy Recovery industry produces about one-sixth of the dioxins produced by one Bonfire Night’. (Reader beware: I have not been able to track down the original source of these comments).
EfW I think is another of those "least worse technologies". SELCHP in Bermondsey takes 420,000 tonnes of waste a year: to replace it we would have to find a hole in London that can take this material, and persuade the locals to accept it. My main reservation is that these plants have maybe a 30-year life and once they are built we have to go on feeding them - if the waste management industry is tooled up to deliver to an EfW there is little incentive for it to increase recycling rates or otherwise reduce the volume of waste. The same applies to ADs of course.
Originally posted in Second Nature 014 (March 2024). Category waste management tags EfW.
Click on a link to see related content. For an index of all categories and tags on this site click here.