Design and performance evaluation of a waste-to-energy plant integrated with a combined cycle

In this paper, a waste-to-energy (WTE) system integrated with a gas fuelled combined cycle is considered. The plant is designed as a possible future option for thermal utilization of urban wastes in the northern part of the Turin Province, Italy. The plant should provide electricity (about 160MW at maximum electric load) to the grid and heat to a district heating network (about 50MW at maximum thermal load). This kind of plants is particularly interesting because of the high net electric efficiency (about 46%) that is possible to achieve, compared with the equivalent global efficiency of the separate plants (about +7% waste utilization efficiency with respect to conventional plants), and the complex design that is required.