Gas turbine power plant for solving environmental problems
On average, each person annually produces about one ton of various solid domestic waste (MSW) or simply garbage, i.e. residents of Ukraine “generate” more than 20 million tons of waste per year. And in the future, this number will only increase, which creates significant environmental problems on an increasing scale. A similar problem exists in all countries. To solve it, in 2005, the EU adopted a directive, which is called “Zero Waste” for short. the goal of this directive is the complete elimination of waste by 2030. As a result, in Europe, garbage, except as a source of secondary raw materials (waste paper, metal, partly plastic), has begun to be used more actively as fuel at special incineration combined heat and power plants (CHP).
According to experts and the experience of operating such thermal power plants, four tons of waste used as fuel replaces one ton of oil or 1100 m3 of natural gas.
Currently, about 500 such CHP plants are already operating in Europe and new ones are constantly being built. In Europe in 2020, about 50 million tons of waste was processed into energy, and more than 27 million people used electricity generated from it. It is planned that in the next 5 years the amount of waste processed in this way will double.
Alas, the situation in Ukraine is still sad – only one percent of the garbage is disposed of at the country’s only incineration plant in Kyiv. All the other tens of millions of tons of garbage are disposed of in landfills, most of them absolutely illegal. In Ukraine there are officially 5,455 landfills and landfills with a total area of over 8.5 thousand hectares. Such data are provided by the Ministry of Regional Development, Construction and Housing of Ukraine.
Realizing this problem, three Mykolaiv enterprises – a leading Ukrainian developer and manufacturer of gas turbine engines for power plants “Zorya-Mashproekt”, engineering company “Electrim-2000” and mechanical engineering “Respect Business” – jointly developed a project of an environmentally friendly gas turbine power plant, which will recycle household waste into light and heat. This power plant, consisting of a line for sorting waste, its pyrolysis and a 2 gas turbine power units, will be able to cleanly process 55 tons of waste per day, generating 10 MW of electrical energy during peak hours (this energy is enough for about two thousand apartments). The pilot powerplant is planned to be built at one of the landfills in the Mykolaiv region. This power plant will be able not only to make electricity and heat supply more reliable, but also to radically improve the environmental situation in the area adjacent to the landfill, and in the future, as additional power units are commissioned, and completely eliminate the landfill.
Taking into account the need to solve the problems of recycling the growing amount of garbage and reducing dependence on energy imports, “Zorya-Mashproekt” and “Electrim-2000” experts expect that in Ukraine in the coming years it is necessary to build at least 100 such power plants, which will not only get rid of millions of tons of garbage, save more than a billion cubic meters of natural gas per year and make the power supply during peak hours more reliable also.
