We didn’t get a chance to visit, but we were rather impressed with the views of Copenhill, the city’s enormous waste to energy plant. I wonder if there’s any other waste to energy plant that would cause children to jump up and down with excitement on spotting it.
Some of the waste burned in Copenhagen has come from the UK. It has also burned biomass at times, another thing that had been ruled out initially. Amager Bakke is basically too big, and it cost too much. The cost overruns mean that it the five municipal authorities that own it have to keep it running or it won’t pay for itself.
Although it was specifically ruled out during the planning of the project, the plant has had to import rubbish from overseas to burn. This is embarassing, and of course it increases the emissions from the transport. Some of the waste burned in Copenhagen has come from the UK.
It is possible to sell heat to two of Copenhagen’s subsystems in the district heating network: the local distribution system of Hofor, and the transmission network of CTR. This is done in specially developed double tube-bundle condensers.
Flue gas condensation has been retrofitted to several existing facilities, so in Denmark around 70% of the installed waste-to-energy capacity was equipped with flue gas condensation by the end of 2017. The main process flow diagram for the Amager Bakke facility can be seen in Figure 6, and the main design parameters are listed in Table 1.
Denmark has a target of 70% recycling rates by 2025, and waste to energy is supposed to deal with the remainder – in this case the non-recyclable waste from an entire city and the surrounding area. Unfortunately the Danes are slightly too good at recycling and the plant hasn’t had enough to burn.