Jawahar Nagar dumpyard receiving solid waste from across the city and outskirts will soon be home to a waste-to-energy thermal power plant with high establishment cost.
Capital cost of the 19.8 megawatt waste-to-energy plant will be between ₹15 crore to ₹18 crore per megawatt (MW), said officials from the Ramky Enviro Engineers, the concessionaire for solid waste management in the city.
Calculated on the total project cost of ₹340 crore, the cost per megawatt works out to more than ₹17 crore — higher than permitted by the regulator. The Telangana State Electricity Regulatory Commission, through its order in 2016, has capped the capital cost for the waste-to-energy plants at ₹14 crore per megawatt.
The Central Electricity Regulatory Commission, in 2015 orders, fixed it at ₹15 crore per megawatt, while the draft terms and conditions in 2017 say that the commission will determine project specific cost based on prevailing market trends.
The capital cost for waste to energy plants fixed by the Gujarat Electricity Regulatory Commission is the highest in the country, at ₹16 crore per megawatt.
Advanced technology
Officials from Ramky attribute the cost to the ‘state-of-the-art’ technology being used in the power plant, which includes flue gas treatment plant. The plant is half way through construction and likely to be ready by the year-end, they informed.
This unit, nevertheless, cannot use up the entire waste being processed in the dump yard, which weighs approximately 5000 tonnes per day. Of the whole, the plant is capable of using up only about 1200-1500 tonnes.
As per the initial agreement with the GHMC in 2008, the concessionaire is obligated to set up waste-to-energy plants with 48 MW capacity, in public-private-partnership mode.
Different locations
The remaining capacity too will be achieved eventually, officials said. Though the initial plan was to set up two units of 24 MW capacity each, now the idea is to split up the capacity into different plants to be set up at various newly identified dump sites.
The government has already identified four sites for decentralisation of garbage dumping and processing, and the future power plants may be set up at these locations, Mayor Bonthu Ram Mohan has said.
Ramky, which had established another 24 MW waste-to-energy plant at Delhi, is yet to enter into any agreement with the Telangana State Power Transmission Corporation (TSTransco) for purchase of the power to be produced at the plant under construction at Jawahar Nagar. An application has been made, and deliberations are on with the corporation, officials disclosed.
