With the rise in population and urbanisation, waste generation in cities has increased rapidly over the past few years. Tall mountains of waste on the roadside are not an uncommon sight, even in the country’s capital city. These dumping grounds are not only unpleasant to the eyes, but also have a hazardous impact on the environment as well as on people’s health, such as surface and ground water contamination, release of greenhouse gases, accidental hazards caused by fire, etc. Therefore, to promote waste utilisation and recovery of energy from this waste, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) is implementing the Programme on Energy from Urban, Industrial and Agricultural Wastes/ Residues. The programme provides central financial assistance in the form of a back-ended subsidy to developers for setting up of waste-to-energy (WtE) projects.
As of November 2019, India has installed 201 WtE plants for generation of biogas, bio-compressed natural gas (bioCNG) and power from urban, industrial, agricultural and municipal solid waste (MSW). Of these, the number of plants that have been set up to generate biogas, bioCNG and power are 83, 22 and 96, respectively, and have an aggregate installed capacity of 330.93 MW.
Case study: IR’s WtE plant
On January 22, 2020, Indian Railways (IR) commissioned its first WtE plant at Bhubaneswar. The plant was constructed in three months at a cost of Rs 17 million. The income from the byproducts of the plant is estimated to be Rs 1.75 million per year. It uses a patented technology, Polycrack, the world’s first patented heterogeneous catalytic process that converts multiple kinds of feedstock into hydrocarbon liquid fuels, gas, carbon and water. The plant is capable of taking in all types of plastic, petroleum sludge, unsegregated MSW with moisture content of up to 50 per cent, and organic waste, among others. This technique has several advantages over the conventional method of solid waste treatment. It has a closed-loop system and does not emit any hazardous pollutants into the atmosphere. Besides, it reuses the combustible, non-condensed gases to provide energy to the entire system, making it self-reliant. The only emissions from the plant come from combustion of gaseous fuels, which are less than the prescribed environmental norms. The footprint of the plant is smaller than the conventional processing method.
Upcoming WtE plants
A number of WtE projects have recently been sanctioned by various state governments. In January 2020, the Punjab government approved a 7 MW WtE plant at Simgauli village in Mohali district. The plant will be built on an area of 50 acres on the build-own-operate model. It is expected to generate power from 600 tonnes per day (tpd) of waste collected from Mohali and Patiala. According to the state government, the project will contribute to the implementation of the State Action Plan on Climate Change and the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.
The Kerala government has sanctioned the setting up of two centralised solid WtE plants at Kanjikode and Kannur to a consortium led by Organic Recycling Systems Private Limited, Mumbai. The Kanjikode plant will be built on a design-build-finance-operate-transfer basis in public private partnership mode. It will be designed to process 200 tpd of municipal waste into energy, manure and biogas. The state government has also sanctioned another five similar projects at Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Thrissur, Kozhikode and Malappuram.
Further, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) is currently setting up an 11 MW WtE plant at Pirana. The plant is expected to be operational by the end of 2020 and will turn 1,000 tonnes of waste to energy every day. The AMC has signed power purchase agreements with two companies to convert domestic garbage into energy at a rate of Rs 7.03 per unit and Rs 7.07 per unit respectively.
In another development, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) has finally awarded a contract to set up a WtE plant at Deonar. The contractor will undertake the first phase of converting 600 tpd of waste into energy at a cost of about Rs 6 billion. The fresh waste coming to the dumping ground will be processed under the first phase, generating around 25 MW of electricity. The MCGM had initially planned a WtE plant with a processing capacity of 3,000 tpd. However, due to the inadequate response, it planned to implement the project in three phases. The second and third phase will involve capacity addition of 1,200 tpd each.
Key concerns
So far, India’s experience with the WtE industry has been lacklustre. Its progress has been largely hampered by the compositional characteristics of the unsegregated waste. The waste generated is rich in moisture and organic components with low calorific value, impacting the efficiency of electricity generation. Besides, the high capital as well as operations and maintenance costs of these plants put a big question mark on their profitability. The MNRE offers financial incentives to developers that reduces the project cost by about 40 per cent. Still, the cost of electricity produced from these plants is almost double that from coal and solar plants. Besides, running these plants is also an expensive affair as the burning of unsegregated waste requires the use of additional fuel, increasing operational costs. As a result, a number of WtE plants in Kanpur, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Vijayawada, Karimnagar, etc. have been shut down.
The way ahead
WtE plants can be a big relief for cities with overflowing dumping grounds and increasing levels of waste generation. Of late, the adoption of advanced technologies has enabled developers to provide efficient solid waste management. In order to maximise returns from WtE projects, issues that hinder project implementation such as lack of credible data systems, poor financial health of city corporations, slow adoption of technologies and involvement of multiple agencies need to be addressed in a time-bound manner.