Don't Waste Waste, Put it to Work

October 22, 2006 – Vol.11 No.31

DON’T WASTE WASTE. PUT IT TO WORK.

Every industrial facility, every municipality should take note: There’s probably energy in your waste stream. Waste is a renewable resource: We’re always making more.

While burning waste for energy hasn’t always been clean, but newer technologies can make it so. Dumping waste in landfills is a waste of waste and can be a long term environmental hazard: Ditto for dumping it in the water.

--- AmerenUE's 855-megawatt Meramec Plant in South St. Louis County, Missouri will be the first power plant in the US to burn waste paint solids as fuel. Over the life of an 18 month pilot program, 1000 tons of recovered paint solids from DaimlerChrysler's Fenton, Missouri plant will be mixed with coal and burned in Meramec’s boilers.

AmerenUE says paint waste will displace about 570 tons of coal and generate enough electricity to power 70 homes each year. Ordinarily paint solids would have been tossed into a landfill. Visit Ameren UE’s parent company at http://www.ameren.com/

--- The City of Baltimore, Maryland will cut its annual electric bill by $1.4 million each year by converting methane gas to electricity at its Back River Waste Water Treatment Plant to electricity.

Typically, methane had been flared off at the site, but now with cogeneration equipment set to be installed by Johnson Controls, methane will be used to run generators and fuel existing boilers and heaters used at the plant. Johnson Controls will also make efficiency improvements to lighting, heating and air conditioning systems at the facility to save an additional $400,000 each year in energy and operational costs.

Importantly Johnson Controls says the kind of system installed at Back River could be economically feasible for any community with 50,000 or more people. There are lots of those communities. Visit Johnson Controls at http://www.johnsoncontrols.com/ .

--- Tulare City, California’s municipal wastewater treatment plant will be running mostly on dairy-processing waste by the middle of 2007. But, unlike the Back River project in Baltimore (above), this plant will use a fuel cell, not engines, to generate heat and power.

Consisting of three 250 kilowatt Direct Fuel Cells (DFC) units from Fuel Cell Energy, the 750-kilowatt power plant will operate on digester gas (mostly methane) from decaying milk processing waste from nearby industrial food processors. Milk waste is a significant portion of the sewage normally treated at the plant. The DFCs will operate around the clock and high efficiency will be achieved by using excess heat from the fuel cell to make more digester gas fuel. This waste water treatment power project, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, is Fuel Cell Energy’s twelfth worldwide. Visit Fuel Cell Energy at http://www.fuelcellenergy.com/

--- Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene,Texas will disconnect itself from the power grid when a $39 million waste-to-energy plant is complete. The WOWGen(tm) power plant to be installed by Siemens Building Technologies will use gasified Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) from Dyess and the City of Abilene. The proprietary combined cycle system will convert heat exiting the gasifier to electricity. An additional technology removes nearly all noxious emissions.

The power plant will produce 6 megawatts of power, plenty to set Dyess permanently free from the power grid. The WOW Energies technology can recover waste heat from a number of sources including solar thermal, geothermal and heat from burning biomass fuels, according to the company. Visit WOW Energies at http://www.wowenergies.com/ Siemens Building Technologies at http://www.us.sbt.siemens.com/