Fortum Klaipeda: Waste should produce energy

The Baltic energy sector, still dominated by gas-fuelled power generation and largely isolated from the rest of the EU, is hungry for innovation. The waste-to-energy heat and power plant built by Finnish Fortum, in Lithuania’s third largest city of Klaipeda, seems to be a perfect offer to a market desperately looking for sources more sustainable than imported gas.

Waste and refuse from both households and enterprises in Klaipeda—a port and a major industrial hub—and the neighbouring municipalities, is fuel the new CHP plant can always count on. Out of 250,000 tonnes of waste or biofuel the plant can handle in a year it is capable of producing 380 GWh of heat and 120 GWh of electricity.

Heat is Fortum Klaipeda’s principle product to be supplied to the local district heating system. It is expected to cover no less than 40% of the city’s heat requirements.

“Currently [the interview took place shortly before the official launch of the plant], we are filling up our storage with energy waste from municipal landfills,” says Juozas Doniela, Managing Director of the plant.

In fact, the local landfill has been collecting and sorting municipal waste to meet the quality requirements of the new plant for a year in advance. It’s not certain for how long the plant can run on these deposits, while older refuse dumped that was never sorted and saw years of rain and snow on landfills is not suitable for incineration. To compensate for the varying quality of waste the plant also purchases wooden pellets.

“This is a temporary solution. We need to be able to run the plant just on waste from landfills to keep our cost structure from rising,” says Mr Doniela.

Not only does the plant not pay for the waste, but it also receives a moderate fee for processing it. On the other hand, the pellets are part of the costs. To phase out the costly alternative, the plant considers applying to the Ministry of the Environment for a permit to start collecting waste from a larger geographic area further away from Klaipeda beginning in 2014.

“The municipalities are interested is our services because the EU puts increasingly tight demands on depositing municipal waste at landfills. As of this year, the municipalities have to decrease the bio-degradable fraction of waste deposited at landfills by as much as 50%,” Mr Doniela continues.

The waste volumes are snowballing by leaps and bounds. The alternative to a waste-to-energy plant is to keep building new layers of waste on landfills, investing in their expansion and polluting the soil and air. A modern incineration plant does seem to be a very good idea for Klaipeda and its region. No one stands to lose, right?

“Our competitors. The city used to get most of its heat from gas-fired plants. Of course, the gas importers are not happy with the changes, but decreasing the dependence on gas imports is a key to better sustainability, not only in our business, but in the economy as a whole,” says Mr Doniela.

He admits the local community was not without doubts when Fortum announced the plans for building a waste-to-energy plant.

“People were very much concerned about the smell from the waste and emissions from the incineration. They thought the landfill was moving closer to their homes,” says Mr Doniela.

The plant uses the so-called semi-dry flue gas cleaning technology in the incineration, which allows keeping emissions within strict limits.

“We continue to explain and invite people to the plant. We have even arranged a study trip for a group of environmental activists to a similar plant Fortum runs in Sweden,” Mr Doniela continues.

“Isn’t it obvious that keeping all of what we burn here for heat on a landfill emits methane and bad smells directly into the atmosphere?”

To be more specific, the new plant is expected to decrease carbon dioxide emissions in the Klaipeda area by about 100,000 tonnes a year. The total amount of Fortum’s investment in the plant in Klaipeda is EUR 140 million, of which EUR 70 million is covered by a seven-year loan from NIB. In 2012, this was the largest foreign direct investment in Lithuania.

“I’m sure the waste-to-energy business has very good potential in a modern society. It has a special place in our country’s national energy strategy. Waste should produce heat and energy,” says Mr Doniela.

According to Fortum, the technology of the Klaipeda plant meets the Best Available Techniques requirements defined by the European Union.

“It is a robust and proven technology to secure high availability and high environmental standards with all sorts of wastes. There are hundreds of similar plants in Europe. Emissions limitations for waste-to-energy plants are much stricter than for power plants utilising traditional fuels,” says Jaakko Vähä-Piikkiö, Vice President Baltic Countries at Fortum Power and Heat Oy.

To build a waste-to-energy plant in Klaipeda was a logical decision, because, firstly, Lithuania is desperately in need of innovative solutions—the price tag on Russian gas to Lithuania has been the highest in Europe in recent years. Secondly, Fortum holds a stake in the local energy company Klaipedos Energija that operates the heating network.

The Klaipeda waste-to-energy plant is the first of its kind in the region. With just 35 employees, working in shifts to run the plant 24/7 and covering almost half of a medium-size industrial city’s heating needs, the CHP plant in Klaipeda raises productivity standards in the Baltic region’s heating branch.

Mr Vähä-Piikkiö believes that similar plants will sooner or later emerge in the Baltic region to meet the requirements of waste management.

“It’s a corner stone of Fortum’s strategy that we establish efficiently combined heat and power production utilising local renewable fuels. In this way we are able to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and, thus, to the mitigation of the climate change,” he concludes.