It has been heartening to witness the meteoric rise of waste-to-energy (W2E) projects over the past decade. There has been growing recognition that waste can be converted into lower carbon “drop-in fuels”, such as Renewable Diesel (RD), Renewable Natural Gas (RNG), Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), etc., that can decarbonize certain segments of our economy today because they can be used with existing infrastructure.
Policies in the US such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administered Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) administered Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) take most of the credit for spurring this growth. The LCFS program rewards projects based on their Carbon Intensity (CI), which is a technologyneutral, merit-driven approach to ensuring the fuels with the best decarbonization impact win. W2E projects typically have strong CI scores. Accordingly, it is not a surprise that, per recent CARB data, nearly half of all diesel sold in California came from RD and almost all natural gas consumed in California CNG-fueled trucks came from RNG. With more states in the US adopting an LCFS-like program, and several incentives from the recent Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) being CI-based, one can see how W2E has an even brighter future.
However, there is one major headwind: the power crunch. You need energy to convert waste to energy (no pun intended!). Typically, W2E projects tend to be located close to waste sources. For example: Deploying an RNG project at a landfill nearly quadruples the power demand at that landfill as it takes energy to extract and upgrade landfill gas into RNG. Moreover, bolting carbon capture technologies at W2E plants (as many ethanol and RNG plants are planning to do) further drives significantly increased power demand.
The message I would leave with all W2E developers is that we need to capitalize on all the policy tailwinds to maximize the growth and decarbonization potential of W2E
Getting all this additional power from the grid can no longer be taken for granted. Why?
First, forecasted electricity demand in the US will dramatically outpace historical demand (see RMI chart), with projections ranging from 6% to 25% increase over the next 5 years (from roughly flat the last 20 years). This increased demand stems from significant growth in powerhungry data centers and Artificial Intelligence, continued electrification of transportation, onshoring of manufacturing, and expected deployments of IRA driven power sapping technologies such as Direct Air Capture and Electrolysis (to make Green Hydrogen). Second, the power supply is not coming online fast enough. Fossil fuel and nuclear power plant retirements are far outpacing new supply coming online. New intermittent resources present a challenge to aging grid infrastructure from managing generation capacity, transmission congestion, and managing long and slow-moving interconnection queues. According to the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), the majority of North America is now at Elevated or High Risk of power shortages (see chart). Third, the frequency and duration of grid outages are increasing rapidly due to aging grid infrastructure and an increase in weather events. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information (NECI), the number of billion-dollar-plus weather events has increased eight-fold since 1980 (see chart). As a result of all of this, power availability at sufficient quantity and quality is no longer a given when developing W2E projects - it is now a critical path item driving project viability.
Fortunately, there are solutions that can be deployed today to address this issue, while providing other project benefits. Developers can deploy their own power generation onsite. Which power generation technology to choose depends on the situation, but it is safe to say that the ideal solution should be available in months (not years), be reliable (operate 24x7), be clean (lower CI than the grid with no local air pollution), be fuel flexible (run on fuels available today as well as lower CI fuels in the future), and be reasonably power dense (i.e. space efficient). One such technology that hits all of the above criteria is fuel cells. Bloom Energy (NYSE: BE), the market leader in stationary fuel cells for power generation, has deployed 1.2 GW of its Energy Server farms across 1000+ sites globally. When deployed at a W2E facility, these Energy Server farms can provide heat and power at 90%+ overall efficiency, reduce CI from process energy to the tune of ~40% (~80% when the CO2 can be captured) and more importantly, be deployed in months. These systems can also be deployed in conjunction with other technologies such as solar and energy storage in a multi-technology microgrid.
The message I would leave with all W2E developers is that we need to capitalize on all the policy tailwinds to maximize the growth and decarbonization potential of W2E. Do not screen out projects because of lack of grid power availability, because you will be screening out a lot of them. Onsite power generation solutions with strong track records are available to you TODAY from Bloom Energy.
