India – waste-to-energy plan lashed by experts

A stream of protests has hit India‘‘s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) for sanctioning municipal waste-to-energy (MWTE) projects that are collapsing under an avalanche of incombustible effluent, according to IPS-Inter Press Service, cited in Power Engineering International.



"The technology of converting waste to energy from purely organic wastes through bio-methanation is working successfully in many small, private projects in India. But our city municipalities are indifferent to segregation and hence unable to provide sufficient combustible matter," says Almitra Patel, who heads a committee on solid waste appointed by India‘‘s Supreme Court in 2000.



Patel, an engineer with a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was handed the job against a petition she made on the lack of measures taken by municipalities to dispose garbage safely.



According to Patel, Indian garbage contains more moisture and construction debris than Western garbage and is therefore better suited to composting, which provides multiple benefits and is a cheaper alternative on the current land-space being used for infrastructure-intensive and exorbitant foreign projects.



"The Indian taxpayer is already hugely burdened by government grants given to such inherently uneconomic waste-to-electricity schemes," said Patel in an IPS interview. "The grant amount itself is enough to set up at least double the amount of compost sites."



The MNRE grants approximately 340,000 to 680,000 US dollars per mw of renewable energy as incentive to industry, attracting several foreign and national companies.



The Washington-based Global Environment Facility provided 5.5 million US dollars in 1994, used mainly for consultancies and technologies, in promoting waste-to-energy projects. Several Western countries are now encouraging their industries to set up municipal waste-to-energy plants in India.



In 1985, the New Delhi municipality spent between 4.5m to 9.96 million US dollars employing Danish firm Volund Milijontecknik in the Timarpur area for a waste-to-energy plant which collapsed in 21 days due to the machinery‘‘s inability to handle the high content of sand and debris.



Timarpur has yet again become controversial with an Indian investment bank, Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd., setting up the Timarpur Waste Management Company to generate 6 mw of electricity through biomass gasification with a 20 percent grant, and two others in southern Andhra Pradesh state. Both plants have reportedly recently shut down.



Delhi-based Gopal Krishna of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives says the project is now incorrectly trying to earn carbon credits through the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol. "As per the Kyoto Protocol itself, waste incineration is a greenhouse gas emitter," he says.



In Lucknow, capital of northern Uttar Pradesh state, a 5-mw waste-to-energy project designed to handle 200 to 300 tonnes of municipal waste per day, set up at a cost of 18 million dollars, besides a government subsidy of $3.3 million "has literally gone down the drain," says Krishna.



"Since 1994, 33 MWTE proposals using three million dollars as subsidy were non-starters; and 2 out of three projects begun for generating 17.6 Mw in Delhi, Lucknow, Vijayawada and Hyderabad, are failures," says Patel.



Only one of at least seven MWTE projects is currently in working condition in the country, even while several more in various cities countrywide are on the anvil.



Both non-government organisations (NGOs) and experts attribute India‘‘s impracticable MWTE ventures to the financial grants taken from public taxpayers‘‘ money and given them by the government. Companies jump in for the potential profits due to financi