[kublikhan]

I agree with Ghung. Burning trash for power is a really bad idea for a multitude of reasons:

1. It's expensive. Trash incineration is the most expensive way to either make energy or dispose of waste:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')rash Incineration is the Most Expensive Way to Make Energy

[Tanada]

Got any cost estimates that don't come from the solar propaganda department? Could be the Natural Gas department based on that first graph.

Reality check time.
Is it reasonable to consider municipal waste streams as an energy source?
Yes. Clearly you can burn, compost, or otherwise consume municipal waste in a fashion that is net energy positive.

Is it reasonable to consider municipal waste a perpetual energy source?
Yes. Clearly people have always produced waste products and the more 'advanced' the culture the more 'waste' products it has produced. Up until the mid 20th century people in general dealt with their waste on a very small scale because scrap food was sent off to feed the livestock, especially the swine which are omnivores, and the burnable waste was generally consumed at home in the coal or wood stove as supplementary fuel. When Americans and Europeans went full urban this 'waste' became a problem but for the bulk of the population the material was consumed in the above fashions and the remnant glass/metal objects were tossed in a pile or pit unless or until the recycling price was worth the cost of hauling them in for reclamation.

People by our very nature generate a lot of trash. The consumer society that developed starting about 80 years ago has greatly increased the volume of this 'waste' because every nick knack comes individually packaged in various forms of plastic or paper or both.

Green dreams about the low consumption culture right around the future aside even 1920 NYC and San Fransisco generated millions of tons of combustible municipal waste and the quantity today is a great deal higher no matter how many recycling programs that cities have played around with over the years. Landfilling this waste is a stupid option taking up vast quantities of effort and energy in the process. Do you think all those gigantic bulldozer's and roller crushers with their smoke belching diesel engines are going to be electrified any time soon? What about all the semi loads of additional clay that are hauled in every year to seal down one months layer of trash before the next much is packed down on top for its turn at the burial process? The way a landfill works is large trucks haul in trash, it gets compated until the pile starts to get inconvenient to work around, then a layer of clay soil is dumped on top and packed down to seal it in and prevent disease from spreading as the organic materials decay. Then the next pile is dumped and crushed down beside the first and so on to the second and third and so on and so forth until the entire area of the dump has a layer of trash packed down and entombed. When the last pile is buried a dirt ramp is built on the edge so that the next pile can be built on top of the existing layer starting at the far edge and crossing the total area of the landfill until you are back to the ramp again, at which point the ramp is extended up another increment to begin the next layer. I have written elsewhere that the Toledo municipal landfill is now the highest 'mountain' within fifty miles of Lake Erie and can be easily spotted from I-75 from a distance of many miles because the landscape in this region is nearly flat. Larger cities build bigger mountains at an even faster rate with the exception of places on the ocean coast where sometimes they haul the trash out to sea and dump it in the ocean. I don't know it they still get away with that many places, but NYC was quite famous for it not all that long ago, turning a local problem into another tragedy of the commons.

You fellows can have all the green dreams you want, but at some point you need to recognize that the vast bulk of humanity does not share your dream and are not going to willingly live an austere lifestyle. Once you accept that reality you can move on to evaluate the options for handling municipal waste as cleanly and efficiently as possible.

My personal preference is to put everything organic through the TDP process to get back as much liquid fuel as possible and use the residual solid organic waste as supplemental fuel in coal/incinerator plants where the pollution controls are enforced. So far no major municipality has adopted the TDP option which leaves direct incineration either as a loan or co-fuel in a power production facility. Yes metals and inorganic materials like Glass should be separated out and recycled, but in practical terms that is a low percentage of the total municipal waste stream and an effective recycling system for glass and metal reduces it even further. I say effective deliberately because every study undertaken shows that even with moderately strong incentives a lot of metal and glass still end up in the waste stream.

Graeme and I banged heads a lot over the issue of the possible vs the ideal because he always saw that ideal solutions could be made to work in certain contexts if everyone behaved in a certain fashion. The problem is humans do not behave in those manners that make the ideal solutions work unless they absolutely have no choice, like sailors in a submarine on a long patrol or astronauts in the ISS-A. This brings me to my next point, what do the Sailors and Astronauts do with their waste that can not be easily recycled on board their moderately closed system environments? Well Sailors on Submarines have a nifty trash compactor/airlock system that lets them crush and eject their compacted waste out of the submarine in deep water where it sinks to the sea floor. The Astronauts on the other hand load all their accumulated waste into the cargo pod which brought up the replacement food and other consumable supplies. Once it is packed as full as they can get it the cargo unit is cast free and fires retro rockets to reenter the earth atmosphere at a shallow angle to provide maximum heating and burn it into as fine a dust as possible that scatters through the air and slowly descends to the surface.

So there you have it, two of the most expensive and most self contained systems built by humans still generate waste streams that have to be dealt with in the real world, not the ideal world.

Incinerating municipal waste and reclaiming the energy liberated in the process provides a steady 24/7/365 energy supply and landfilling or dumping that waste at sea are extremely poor choices IMO. As pointed out by the OP if the Baltimore incinerator were sited out of visible range of the people involved it wouldn't be a fight of any sort. I was a starry eyed environmental activist once and I learned the hard way it got me exactly nowhere with my neighbors, family, friends, or government, until I reevaluated my positions from ideal to practical. I urge everyone else to do the same.

[kublikhan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'G')ot any cost estimates that don't come from the solar propaganda department? Could be the Natural Gas department based on that first graph.

[GHung]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'K')ub said; "Instead, tax it. Then people will pay attention real fast."

[Tanada]

I never said incineration power was clean and green, I said you can use the same kind of pollution controls modern coal power stations use and clean up the exhaust streams. In addition it is a far better IMO to use the energy potential than to idiotically bury it in a landfill that will have the potential of leaking for many generations in the future. Landfilling combustible waste ranks right down there with discarding once through nuclear fuel in my book. If you killed a tree to make packaging and you choose not to go through the extensive cleaning and bleaching process necessary to reuse the cardboard then you by golly ought to at minimum use it to generate power and offset some fossil fuel use, though TBH turning it into fiber fill cellulose insulation would be a better end use.

As for the claims in the links you provided, the overnight capital costs document dates from 2013 and is simply an update from the 2010 document based on what it says on the front page.

The excel spreadsheet on the other hand is dated 2012 and proclaims that not only does it costs 2.5 times as much to construct a municipal waste power station as it does to build a modern cheap coal power plant, it also claims it costs 1.5 times as much as to build a Nuclear power station of the same capacity. Does that seem remotely plausible to you? It sure as heck sets off red flags for me. It then goes on to say the daily costs for running a Municipal plant are 1.85 times as much as running that same coal power station despite the fact that the municipal waste is already paid for fuel wise (the residents and business pay to have it disposed of) and in many states like Maryland in the story the OP quoted give it the same renewable standard as Wind power generators. Oh I am certain whomever anonymously authored that excel spread sheet however long ago they created it used real world numbers. They just happened to use the most pessimistic numbers they could find or they were lazy and used the first numbers that popped up from a simple search.

At its core fundamental state what takes place with Municipal waste that would make it more expensive than coal to operate and maintain the plant? Well first off the waste as a general standard is sorted to remove the metal and glass objects. This requires some manpower and some machinery that add expense, that much is true. However the resulting recovered glass and metal is then sent off for recycling through the existing system. The better the local recycling program incentives at the individual consumer level the less effort needed for this portion of the process and the contrary is also true, a system without a recycling system underlain will cost extra. A second factor is the mixed paper/plastic/food waste that remains to be incinerated emits a more complex exhaust gas mixture than typical soft coal or lignite power stations because it has some very strange constituent chemistries. However none of these chemistries are so wildly different than coal emissions as to make the stack scrubbing technology ineffective. IOW a modern incinerator power station using modern exhaust scrubbers will emit exhaust no dirtier than that which comes from a lignite burning power station. There are several large lignite burning plants in the USA but with our abundant resources of soft coal the majority of what we burn is higher grade. Germany on the other hand burns lignite in over half of their coal power stations while in Ireland they even have a federally operated peat burning power system.

As for exacerbating the out of sight out of mind issue the NIMBY effect is doing that on a far grander and more potent scale than any switch made in the USA to trash power stations providing 24/7 power to the grid. Because in the last few years combustion of municipal waste fell out of favor politically in the USA and most of the EU there have not been many new power stations built which makes it hard to get realistic numbers. If the Congress passed a law today saying that the Federal Government would extend renewable energy credits to municipal waste incinerators along the lines of the Wind and Solar energy credits they passed a decade ago provided the resulting power plants complied with the clean air act standards enforced on new coal stations you would see a wave of glowing claims about how building a new incinerator for your city/state was the 'right' thing to do. You know, 'for the children'...

That is the problem with having a highly charged strongly divided electorate, no matter what steps either side takes to promote one form or another of renewable or green energy the other side will reflexively reject it without actually giving it an evaluation based on reality. IMO Wind and Solar have been promoted by the fossil fuel industry because they know that without massive storage availability they can not offset fossil fuels to any great extent. On the other hand when was the last time you saw an article in favor of a large hydro-electric project? Hydroelectricity is 24/7/365 and once the capital investment is paid off it is the cheapest source of electricity for grid baseline power. However all of the large hydroelectric dams are state/federal owned so the utility company profits from them are minimal delivery charges not maximal generation profits. In the same way Trash Incinerators can provide the same kind of 24/7/365 energy to the grid, but because of the sorting requirements they cost more than an equally sized coal burning facility. In some cases the incinerators are government owned though I am not sure this is always the case. A minor set of incentives would offset the sorting costs and by declaring municipal waste a renewable fuel source able to receive the same tax incentives as other green technology would make them a profit earning enterprise for any utility company instead of a perceived drag on the bottom line.

[kublikhan]

About the pollution, if you use scrubbers/filters that only shifts the pollution from the air to solid form. Which then gets buried in landfills. And which has such a heavy concentration of toxins that normally it won't legally be allowed to be buried. And the pollution inevitably ends up leaking into ground water.

About the capital costs, the reason they are so high is that a WTE plant produces much less electricity compared to a nuclear plant. For example, the Montevideo WTE plant below has a capacity of 43 MW for a cost of $420 million. This comes out to a capital cost of 9,767 $/kW, even higher than the capital costs given by the EIA. Compare that to a train wreck nuke plan: Flamville 3 which is going way over budget. Even with the costs nearly tripling from projected costs, the WTE plant is still around 1.5 as expensive as the nuke plant. Note this is a worst case scenario for nuclear. I'm not comparing to ultra cheap China nukes which would blow WTE out of the water.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')TE plant in Montevideo
Capital required to build: $420 million
capacity: 43 MW
electricity generated per year: 380 GWh
cost to build per kW: $420,000,000 / 43 MW = $9,767,442 per MW or 9,767 $/kw