OREANDA-NEWS. February 03, 2010. Eesti Energia Supervisory board granted approval for an agreement to build a waste-to-energy (WTE) CHP plant, thus giving a green light for the investment. Cost of the new co-generation plant to be constructed alongside Iru power plant is about EEK 1.5 billion (EUR 97.5 million) and it is planned to burn up to 220,000 tons of waste generated in Estonia every year, reported the press-centre of Eesti Energia.

Construction of the waste incineration plant will begin in Iru, on the outskirts of Tallinn, in summer 2010 and CHP plant will go online in early 2012. Tender process conducted in the summer of 2009 resulted in the selection of the French company Constructions Industrialles De La Mediterranee (CNM) as the contractor.

“Although the heating value of ordinary municipal waste is not comparable to that of oil shale, over 300,000 tons of waste suitable for energy use is deposited into Estonian landfills each year. To make use of this domestic resource, Eesti Energia is building its own mass waste incineration plant,” said Ando Leppiman, Director of Eesti Energia Renewable Energy. “Even after our WTE plant is built, 100,000 tons of waste will continue to be deposited in landfills in Estonia every year and in the future an environmentally friendly way of recovering this share should be found as well. For instance, this waste could be directed to the several Estonian-based Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) plants. Thus we would at some point have the potential to catch up to Germany, where today only 1% of municipal waste is landfilled.

Thermal energy capacity of the new CHP plant will be 50 MW and power generating capacity will be 17 MW. This will complement the existing capacities at Iru power plant (648 MW of heat and 190 MW of electricity).

“As waste is certainly a fuel of domestic origin, the future price of heat will undoubtedly be more stable and favourable than the current price offered to Tallinn and Maardu heat consumers,” added Leppiman.

Most common commercially used mass waste incineration equipment is considered an environmentally friendly technology, which can be used to transform about 85% of the energy contained in waste into electricity and heat. There are over 400 plants that employ this technology in Europe, and among Estonia’s neighbours it is most common in Finland, Sweden and Denmark.