Efficiency enhancement and cogeneration

As well as providing a more environmentally friendly way of disposing of residual waste than sending it to landfill, our EfW plants also produce usable energy in a carbon neutral way. When the waste is burned, the heat produced is used to generate steam. This steam can then be used to produce electricity in a highly efficient 'combined heat and power' (CHP) process. For example, the energy contained in one metric tonne of waste can be turned into 300 kilowatt hours of electrical energy and 700 kilowatt hours worth of usable steam.

Compared with electricity and steam generated in conventional power plants from fossil fuels, MVV’s EfW and biomass plants help to save the emission of approximately 380,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year

Power plants for "new" energy

Overall, our power plants generate around 900 million kilowatt hours of green electricity and around 400 million kilowatt hours of heating energy in the form of steam each year. The electricity generated would be enough to enable an electric car to travel round the world 150,000 times or to supply 250,000 households with electricity for a whole year. In total, we have so far generated and supplied customers with 35 terawatt hours of steam and around 10 terawatt hours of electricity.

Supplying steam

The energy from waste plant in Mannheim supplies process and heating energy to industrial customers via a steam grid with a total length of around 15 kilometres. The steam is supplied via two pipe systems with a pressure of 17 bar and 7 bar respectively.

This way, around 15 industrial customers in the north of Mannheim are supplied with an average of 65 tonnes of process steam an hour. To safeguard our steam supplies, we also maintain an additional boiler power by natural gas. By procuring their heat energy from us, our customers can avoid the investment and expenses required to operate proprietary energy generation plants, and can also thus meet the stringent requirements of the Renewable Heating Energy Act.


Permanent energy efficiency enhancement

In line with the motto “More energy from waste”, a permanent revision process performed together with MVV O&M, the operations management company pursues the objective of continually enhancing energy efficiency at all plants. State-of-the-art computer-assisted simulation tools are deployed to analyse and optimise the power plants.