Renewable Energy Production from Municipal Solid Waste to Mitigate Climate Change: A Spatially Explicit Assessment for Malaysia

Tan, S.T., Leduc, S., & Kraxner, F. (2015). Renewable Energy Production from Municipal Solid Waste to Mitigate Climate Change: A Spatially Explicit Assessment for Malaysia. In: Systems Analysis 2015 - A Conference in Celebration of Howard Raiffa, 11 -13 November, 2015, Laxenburg, Austria.

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Abstract

The utilization of municipal solid waste (MSW) as a renewable resource could overcome waste disposal issues, generate power for fossil fuel displacement, and mitigate CO2 emissions from landfill. However, the availability of waste feedstock varies with the effectiveness of waste management while the profitability and the environmental impact are mostly dependent on the conversion technology, plant location, and plant capacity. This study aims to evaluate the complexity of waste-to-energy (WTE) supply chain networks for energy production and the CO2 mitigation potential through a spatially explicit approach. The Malaysian peninsular is selected as a case study area.
This study adapted the IIASA techno-economic engineering model for optimizing renewable energy systems (BeWhere) and developed a WTE optimization component. The model minimizes the full supply chain cost of WTE, optimizes the capacity and location of WTE production plants, and assesses the energy and by-product potentials. Several scenarios were designed to analyze the impact of energy and carbon mitigation potential of WTE with varying the fossil fuel prices or carbon tax in the supply chain.
The results show that incineration and hydrothermal for power production are the preferred options, primarily because of the low economic investment and the high energy conversion efficiency. Apart from the power as the main product, the system produces biofuel as by-product. It is found that most of the plants are installed in more highly populated cities with large potential for waste biomass, hence reducing logistical costs and emissions from transportation. The preliminary results show that WTE could be substituted for about 9% of the Malaysian power production following a business-as-usual scenario.
The study proved that BeWhere for MSW provides a robust spatial explicit solution for WTE with assessment of the energy production and CO2 mitigation potential.

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