BW Communities

Pioneering A Green Solution

BW Online Bureau Nov 08, 2014

At a time when most power plants in the country are struggling to run their operations due to the shortage of coal, Hanjer Biotech Energies, a Mumbai-based waste management company, is setting up India’s first full-scale green power plant that will generate electricity from waste. The 15-MW plant at Surat in Gujarat will be run on refuse derived fuel (RDF). Hanjer processes about 9,100 tonnes of municipal waste a day across 20 cities at its 24 facilities. The RDF for the Surat plant will be sourced from Hanjer’s waste processing units at Surat, Bhavnagar and Vadodara. This RDF is considered  “green” because it has minimal amount of plastic (around 5 per cent). The RDF generated from municipal solid waste is dried, crushed, screened and packed into brick form. Currently, the “green” RDF is used as a substitute for conventional fossil fuels in boilers and is sold at Rs 2-3 per kg, double the price of normal RDF.<table border="1" align="right" width="100" cellspacing="7" cellpadding="7"><tbody><tr><td>9,100 tonnes of municipal waste is processed by Hanjer Biotech Energies every day.</td></tr></tbody></table>Says Irfan Furniturewala, founder and promoter of Hanjer: “Out of the 9,100-tonnes of waste that we process, around 18-20 per cent is green RDF. With the amount of RDF produced after recycling waste, we can run six 15MW power plants.” About 300 tonnes of RDF a day is required to run a 15-MW power plant; Hanjer processes around 1,800 tonnes of green RDF a day. The RDF-based plant in Surat will be commissioned in about 15-18 months. It will incur a cost of Rs 6.8 crore   per MW, says Furniturewala. Although this would be costlier than a normal coal-based power plant — which costs between Rs 3.5 and 5 crore per MW — today the problem for most the thermal-based power plant has been the availability of coal.  Says Furniturewala: “The internal rate of return from the power project is fixed at 16 per cent and we can’t do much about it. But compared to the power plant built by Jindal (Jindal Ecopolis, a subsidiary of Jindal SAW), we are far more cost efficient as our project cost is much lower. Besides, the waste they are using to generate power is not green.” A spokesperson for Jindal acknowledged that his company had  built a 16-MW power plant at a cost of more than Rs 16 crore per MW. The spokesperson also said that the Jindal Ecopolis plant was using raw waste to generate power. Hanjer has already signed a power purchase agreement with the Gujarat government, which will purchase power from the Surat plant at Rs 6.10 per unit. On the other hand, Jindal sells its power at Rs 2.49 per unit. More than that, the Hanjer power project has the potential to reduce green house gas emissions and will derive an additional revenue stream through carbon credits for Hanjer. “This will have to be shared between Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam and us,” says Furniturewala.  Going ahead, Furniturewala wants to build 110-MW power plants across the country. Although he has most of the raw material (green RDF) in place, he is planning to increase the waste recycling capacity of Hanjer by 5,000 tonnes per day, which will take its total waste recycling capacity to more than 5 million tonnes a year. In July, Hanjer had received funding; $20 from Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH (the German investment and development company), and another $20 million from PROPARCO, the subsidiary of the French Development Agency. While waste-to-energy is not really a new concept in India, scalability has always been a problem. Hanjer for now seems to have got its formula right. But whether Furniturewala is going to succeed in his effort to produce green power, we will have to wait and watch.   (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 13-08-2012)