Cape Town is getting closer to turn waste in to wattage with ‘the estimated date for the first electricity production’ to be ‘somewhere in the second half of the 2024 calendar year’.
As reported by the Cape Business News on 27 February 2024, the City of Cape Town’s mayoral committee members for Urban Waste Management and Energy visited the Coastal Park to ‘to check the latest progress at the waste to energy project on site’.
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This is part of the City of Cape Town Waste to Energy Project, which is designed to ‘to produce electricity from the combustion of landfill gas’.
Landfill gas consists primarily of methane, and is produced when organic matter breaks down an oxygen-depleted environment such as a landfill.
The gas can be converted electricity, which requires ‘perforated pipes or “wells”‘ to be dug into the landfill site to extract the gas and channel it as fuel.’
This will produce electricity in ‘specially-designed engines’.
A specialised thermal mass flow meter must first be installed, before the gas engines can be utilised.
In addition, ‘various regulatory processes’ should be adhered to, to ‘permit the connection of the engines to the electricity grid’.
The City of Cape Town is also awaiting the delivery of critical spares for the gas engines.
At full capacity, it will be able to produce ‘approximately 15 000 000 kWh/year’, and used primarily for ‘powering operations and equipment at the landfill site’. This also includes a new recycling facility that is currently under construction.
It is important to note that the electricity generated by this project will not be enough to off-set loadshedding, but will assist in collaboration with other efforts being made in the Energy Directorate.
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Picture: Cape {town} Etc. library