585,000 tons of garbage can be a huge burden for a metropolis like London. Or perhaps not. An MAN 80-megawatt steam turbine in South East London converts that waste into electrical energy, enabling us to power around 66,000 households. And public buildings. Who says garbage is worthless?
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The new Riverside garbage incineration plant on the Thames in the London suburb of Belvedere is a cornerstone of London City Council’s energy and environmental policy. At the environment conference in Seoul in May 2010, Mayor Boris Johnson formulated his ambitious goal when he said that the city wanted to use the opportunity afforded by the Olympic Games in the summer of 2012 to become the cleanest and greenest city on earth. As part of that goal, London has set its sights on a 60% reduction of climate-damaging carbon dioxide emissions by 2025.
In the London Riverside project, heat and energy are produced from the energy-rich parts of the garbage, such as paper, plastics, textiles and wood. MAN Diesel & Turbo’s steam turbine from Oberhausen in Germany converts energy from three incinerator lines, which, together, dispose of almost 100 tons of garbage per hour.
“With an output of 80 megawatts, this is our largest turbine in the waste-to-energy segment in the UK to date,” says Holger Kube, Sales Manager for Steam Turbines. The term ‘waste-to-energy’ or ‘garbage-to-energy’ has become associated with the use of domestic garbage for production of energy and heat.
With this project, MAN has made an important contribution to environmental protection. Up until now 72% of domestic garbage in the UK was disposed of on garbage dumps. The problem is that landfill gas escapes uncontrolled from the sites. One of these is methane, whose damaging greenhouse effect is 25-times greater than carbon dioxide. In the new plant in Belvedere, no methane is produced and other emissions are cleanly filtered out.
As a result, Riverside is on the way to becoming a reference project for garbage disposal in the British Isles. Today, the plant’s electrical efficiency of 27% is already a European record.
“When the planned district heating for homes and buildings is coupled in, the plant’s fuel efficiency will rise significantly and will then be comparable with the efficiency of a modern coal-fired power plant,” predicts Holger Kube.
Just one example of how MAN technology is working for a better future today.
MAN. Engineering the Future — since 1758.