A Greenwich energy developer is partnering with General Electric Co. on a new type of power plant that will be capable of converting waste into energy with no negative environmental impact.
Green Waste Energy Inc. is developing a series of advanced recycling and energy conversion plants around the world, starting with two plants in the U.K. and one in upstate New York.
The plants will utilize a proprietary, non-burn technology that can transform anything from wood waste to municipal waste into a byproduct known as synthetic gas, or syngas. GE”™s Power and Water unit will provide the plants with its Jenbacher gas engines, which are manufactured in Europe and are capable of transforming the syngas into energy.
“We have a pipeline of projects in other places, including North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Caribbean. So we”™re excited about the partnership and the future of waste energy,” said James Burchetta, CEO of Green Waste Energy. The U.K. and New York plants will be the company”™s first.
Burchetta said the plants will use an advanced thermal conversion process that deprives waste of oxygen, thereby turning it into a gas, known as syngas. He said there is no incineration and that the only emissions meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards.
Once waste is reduced to syngas, the gas will then be fed into the Jenbacher engines to generate electricity.
A medium-size advanced recycling and energy conversion plant developed by Green Waste Energy is able to convert 1,000 tons of municipal solid waste into about 600 megawatt-hours of electricity a day ”“ which is enough to power about 24,000 U.S. homes, according to the Greenwich firm.
“This is a nascent industry,” Burchetta said. “There”™s no advanced thermal plant operated anywhere in the world by anyone. … We”™re not gasification or incineration ”“ we”™re an advanced thermal technology.”
Scott Nolen, GE”™s product line leader of gas engines for power generation, said the term “gas engine” is a misnomer when applied to the Jenbacher engines. He said most of GE”™s gas engines actually burn on things other than natural gas, such as biogas, landfill gas, sewage treatment gas or, in this case, gas synthesized from the breakdown of wood and solid waste.
“The engine itself has been around for a long time ”“ Jenbacher has been involved in building gas engines for 25 or 30 years,” said Nolen, whose team is based in Austria. What”™s changed, he said, is that the drive for renewable energy has presented new uses for the engines.
“If you can burn it, we can probably make energy from it if it”™s a gas,” Nolen said. “It”™s a very nice technology to produce electricity from what would normally be a wasted energy source.”
He said today”™s Jenbacher engines are also able to operate at a much higher efficiency than in the past, which has accordingly lowered the cost of generation.
Burchetta said the U.K. and its European neighbors are “way ahead of the U.S.” when it comes to cutting down on waste deposited in landfills.
“Waste is the number-one health problem in the world,” Burchetta said. “We create it every day. We can”™t bury it because landfills cause methane gas and pollute the land and the water, and we can”™t burn it because of the pollutants it creates.”
He said every day, waste is transported by barge, rail and truck to landfills in remote parts of the U.S.
With the plants Green Waste Energy is developing, “The idea is to keep the trucks off the road, reduce carbon emissions, take the energy that”™s in the waste and in a responsible way, create electricity that can be used by the community,” Burchetta said.
[Editor’s note: This article, a version of which has been published in the May 27 print edition of the Fairfield County Business Journal, was updated May 23. An initial version was published May 16.]
This partnership offers a terrific solution to provide clean energy from waste, essentially killing “two birds with one stone.” Ridding waste on-site by using it as a renewable feedstock to power GE engines and produce electricity is a NIMBY-PROOF solution which must be implemented worldwide. Plus, the unused or capped landfill sites should include solar farms to create an entirely fossil-free solution for generations to come. GE & GWE, I applaud your vision and partnership.