Environment
Projects on making electricity from rubbish kicked off
  • | VietNamNet | August 09, 2011 11:48 PM

Local authorities and industrial enterprises, in a master plan to protect the environment, are moving ahead with the projects on generating electricity from organic rubbish and redundant heat in the production process.

The HCM City Department is considering building power plants which generate power from the rubbish gathered from three big markets of the city, namely Thuc Duc, Hoc Mon and Binh Dien.

The department said 95 percent of the waste is organic rubbish suitable to be used to generate power.

Each of the above said discharges 50 tons or rubbish a day, while the markets’ boards of management have to spend VND300 million (USD14,552) a month on collecting and carrying rubbish to the dumping grounds for treatment.

Meanwhile, the power generation project will help cut down the expenses on gathering rubbish at the markets, while the power to be generated could be provided back to serve the activities of the markets.

The project has been initiated after the local authorities learned about a similar project run by Swedish Boras Company, an energy and environment company, at a small vegetable market in Indonesia which discharges five tons of rubbish a day.

The project in Indonesia has the total investment capital of 340,000 dollars which creates 550kwh of electricity a day. Especially, it helps reduce 2716 tons of CO2 discharged every day to the atmosphere which causes greenhouse effect.

In Vietnam, it is estimated that every power plant at each market would cost 3-4 million dollars. The Ministry of Industry and Trade has agreed to the plan on funding the feasibility study for the program in HCM City. If everything goes smoothly, the program would be started in 2012.

If the project succeeds at the three markets, the same solution would be applied in a larger scale at smaller markets in the city.

HCM City is also developing a project on generating power from rubbish at the Go Cat rubbish dump which has the capacity of 2.4MW.

Industrial enterprises are also considering generating power from the redundant heat during the production process and from waste burning. Dau tu has quoted its sources as saying “that the power generation technology will help reduce the energy consumption by cement plants by 30 percent.”

According to Nguyen Ngoc Anh, General Director of the Vietnam Cement Industry Corporation (Vicem), the Decree No 21, guiding the implementation of the law on saving energy and using energy effectively, stipulates that the new cement plants with the kiln capacity of 2500 tons of clinker per day, must install the systems of equipments which allow to use thermal emission to generate power.

Seven years ago, with the support of the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), Vicem applied the technology on using thermal emission of a reverting furnace to generate at the Ha Tien 2 cement plant. 105 million kwh of electricity have been generated by the power plant.

Within four years, the technology has helped provided the total volume of 72 million kwh to the production lines of the corporation, thus helping save 2.1 million liters of ADO oil, while the dust filtration efficiency has been considerably improved.

Vietnam is also considering two other energy saving technologies which allows to generate power by collecting redundant heat during the cement production and waste burning, provided by Danish FLSmidth.

The projects have been applauded by the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment which has forecast that cement production has been more and more badly affect the environment.

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