An analysis of power generation from municipal solid waste (MSW) incineration plants in Taiwan

Heavily (about 99%) depending on imported energy, Taiwan, a country in the subtropics, has limited natural resources. In this regard, biomass energy from (MSW) municipal solid waste incineration plants thus became attractive during the 1990s. The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive analysis of MSW-to-energy in Taiwan. This paper gave a concise summary of current status of domestic energy consumption &; power generation, MSW generation &; MSW incineration treatment, and electricity generation from MSW incineration plants since 2000. Based on the electricity generation in 2008 (i.e., 2967 GWh), the environmental benefit of mitigating CO₂ emissions and the economic benefit of selling electricity were preliminarily calculated to be around 1.9 × 10⁶ tons and US$ 1.5 × 10⁸, respectively. However, since the heat content of incinerated MSW and the methodologies were used on the recommendation of the (IPCC) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the net emissions of CO₂ equivalent from methane (CH₄) &; nitrous oxide (N₂O) have been estimated to be at around 76,000 and 88,000 tons/year compared to coal and oil, respectively.