This article first appeared in the January/February issue of Waste Management World. Earlier this month Palm Beach's new waste to energy facility helped it to secure the the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County secure the prestigious WTERT Award (see WMW story)...
No country has taken the old adage that bigger is better to heart quite like the U.S. With a capacity to process 3,000 tons of waste per day, that’s a philosophy personified by Palm Beach County’s huge new waste to energy facility. It is the first such plant to be developed in the U.S. for 20 years, but following COP21 agreement and President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, could it be the shape of things to come?
By Ben Messenger
Realizing that its landfill site was running out of space, back in 2008, the Solid Waste Authority (SWA) of Palm Beach County (Florida) put out a request for qualifications for a major new waste to energy facility. The SWA is no stranger to the technology and already owns a 2,000 ton per day Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) waste to energy plant, which has been operated by Babcock & Wilcox (B&W)subsidiary Palm Beach Resource Recovery Corporation since 1989.
By June 2009, the SWA had narrowed the field down to mass burn technology and three companies were asked to bid – Covanta, Wheelabrator and Charlotte, North Carolina based B&W and its consortium partner, KBR. The final bid submission was in December 2010, and, in April 2011, the SWA awarded the project to B&W and KBR.Site clearing work began in December of that year. In April 2012, the team broke ground at the site. The commissioning process was completed and commercial operation began in June 2015.
The new facility, dubbed the Renewable Energy Facility 2 (REF 2), is located on 24 acres of land adjacent to the SWA’s original waste to energy facility, also designed and built by B&W. It will be operated under a 20 year agreement by B&W.
Why?
The SWA also owns and operates its own landfill. According to Larry Hiner, manager for boiler product lines at B&W, the area has experienced fairly significant population growth, and its landfill site was running out of capacity.
The original RDF plant underwent a complete refurbishment between 2007 and 2011. However, the capacity at this single plant is not sufficient to divert sufficient waste from the landfill. If the SWA continued to operate the landfill as they had been, it would have had around 10 years before it was filled.
The situation needed to be addressed, and the SWA was faced with a straight choice between siting a new landfill, or expanding its waste to energy operations.
“Instead of landfilling, they wanted to expand the waste to energy capacity,” Hiner says.“They looked at their population forecasts, there are 1.4 million residents in Palm Beach County currently, and they wanted to build a plant that would meet current requirements and have a little bit of margin to meet future growth.”
Going Large
The projections showed that the SWA would need an additional 3,000 ton per day of capacity to reduce reliance on the landfillby about 90%.
The resulting $672 million facility generates up to 95 MW of electricity and features three lines, each with DynaGrate® air-cooled and water-cooled combustion grates designed by Danish subsidiary B&W Vølund.
The emissions control equipment - including a spray dry absorber, baghouse, carbon injection, and selective catalytic reduction system, as well as duct work and other components – were all designed and manufactured by B&W. In addition, the facility includes a metals recovery system to maximize the recovery of aluminum, steel and other metals.
Education Key to Public Approval
Waste to energy facilities, particularly at this scale, can prove controversial with the local communities. However, with 25 years of operation at the original plant, the SWA has for many years been educating the public to the benefits.
“For around the last 25 years, the original RDF facility has been bringing in school students,” Hiner explains. “Around 25,000 school students per year will tour the facility and be educated on waste to energy. Over the past 25 years a lot of those have gone from being students to being county residents, with some even working for the SWA.”
“When the SWA went out for comments from the local community they got an overwhelmingly positive response,” he continues.“A lot of that was because they did such a good job educating about the value to the community.”
The Future
Large scale waste to energy projects have been somewhat conspicuous by their absence in the U.S. over recent years, but with the introduction by the Obama administration of the Clean Power Plan, new incentives could be in place to encourage major waste to energy developments, such as the REF2.
“One of the reasons why we see it potentially changing is that methane is coming under increasing focus for greenhouse gas reductions,” explains Hiner.“ Landfills are the third largest source of methane. So we think that waste to energy is very complementary to the Clean Power Plan. In fact, our CEO sent a letter to the EPA asking them to take a stronger look at landfill regulations.”
“There are developers out there looking to build facilities with economic subsidies,” he continues. “Palm Beach was not built with a subsidy, but the new Clean Power Plan allows for any plant using renewable fuels and coming into operation after 2012 to be given credits if the state puts it into their implementation plan. We do think Florida has an opportunity to put waste to energy into its implementation plan.”
With green house gas emissions moving up the agenda, and incentives such as those offered in the Clean Power Plan coming into force, the industry could be set for a new golden era in the U.S. But for that to happen, the public will need to be on-board.
