A new method to determine the ratio of electricity production from fossil and biogenic sources in waste-to-energy plants

New directives of the European Union require operators of waste-to-energy (WTE) plants to report the amount of electricity that is produced from renewable sources in the waste feed. Until now, the standard method to determine the portion of renewable electricity is sorting the wastes into defined fractions of fossil organic and biogenic waste components and determining the lower heating value of these fractions. Out of it the amount of electricity production from renewables is calculated. This practice is labor and cost intensive. Therefore, it is usually carried out once a year which provides only a snapshot analysis of limited significance. This paper proposes a method to calculate the portion of electricity produced from renewable materials in waste continuously by solving a set of equations. All data required are either available from literature or from operating data routinely measured in WTE plants. The advantages are statistically derived uncertainty of the result, temporal resolution of the result down to daily mean values, low implementation efforts, and virtually no operational costs. An example of the implementation of the method to a 60 000 tons per year WTE plant is given.