K.S. Sivaprasad, an engineer from India, spent four decades perfecting a factory that accepts city trash, dries it, picks out the burnable elements and ignites them to create electricity. His first full-scale plant chews through 700 tons of garbage a day and delivers 5.5 megawatts to the power grid.
The unfortunate part is that the plant is in Malaysia, not India, where the process was invented. Mr. Sivaprasad, an energetic 80-year-old, went abroad after repeatedly trying to build his project in India but finding that the system was stacked against him, he says.
India tosses more than 188 million tons of garbage each day, but is falling behind other Asian nations in early efforts to turn it into electricity. The Chinese government claims to be on track to produce three gigawatts of power from city waste-to-energy factories by 2015, and Malaysia plans to build a second, larger plant based on Mr. Sivaprasad’s design.
Meanwhile, India has captured methane from several large landfills and has built six facilities that pull out and ignite flammable trash, turning it into what is known as refuse-derived fuel. But these six fuel factories, which rely on new refuse, have either shut down or barely run, victims of equipment failure or bureaucratic snarls that paradoxically leave them short of garbage.
Why? “It is the million-dollar question,” Mr. Sivaprasad said. “I don’t know what to say. India has a lot of hurdles, you know, very bureaucratic. Very difficult. In short, if you put it in a nutshell, technology developed in India has come up in another country.”
India’s output of trash grew nearly 50 percent in the decade ending in 2011, driven by swelling urban populations that have adopted parts of the throwaway Western lifestyle. Those same demographics account for a surge in power usage that has left the country chronically short of electricity and major cities prey to rolling blackouts.
One problem is the nature of trash in the poorer nations of Asia: it is soggier than that of Europe, the United States or Japan and doesn’t easily catch fire. In India, the urban waste mix is nearly 47 percent water, according to a study by the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University. Urbanites in poorer Asian countries cook more of their own food, while more affluent Westerners use more disposable (and flammable) plastic and paper. As a result, urban waste in the developed world is embedded with 10 megajoules of power per ton, while that of countries like India contains just 7.3 megajoules.
The waste-to-energy effort lies at the intersection of two heavy industries, energy production and waste disposal, both of which are hampered by a thick layer of bureaucracy, turf battles among local, state and federal governments and demands for bribes by middlemen. These, along with hefty maintenance costs, make it difficult for a waste-to-energy project to open and stay profitable, according to Amiya Kumar Sahu, president of the National Solid Waste Association of India.
“So far, there is not a single plant in India which is a success story about waste to energy. Not a single one,” Dr. Sahu added.
Another issue is incentives. China and Malaysia finance their waste-to-energy projects with a combination of feed-in-tariffs and tipping fees, giving trash entrepreneurs a reward for consuming trash and for producing power. This approach also gives companies like Mr. Sivaprasad’s time to refine what can be a temperamental technology. The haphazard nature of junk means that an errant piece — say, a shattered bottle — can invade the gears and cause expensive delays.
Mr. Sivaprasad licensed his technique to Malaysia to build the Kajang waste-to-energy plant, which is outside Kuala Lumpur. It is administered solely by the central government and relies for income on a subsidy of 14 cents per kilowatt-hour produced and $13 per ton in tipping fees charged to the municipality of Kajang, whose trash feeds the plant.
In India, by comparison, tipping fees are illegal and subsidies are only for construction. Beyond inviting corruption, this structure gives plant operators no motive to produce power once the plant is built.
Mr. Sivaprasad got interested in turning trash into energy when he visited the United States during the energy crisis in the early 1970’s. By the 1980’s he had built a prototype in Bangalore and received a patent, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990’s that Malaysia approached him about using his design.
The Malaysian factory was completed in 2009 at a cost of $45 million and is about to undergo an expansion that will increase its output to 10 megawatts. A second plant of the same size may break ground soon.
Mr. Sivaprasad’s company, Core Competencies, has brought in Surendra Saxena, an expert in carbon sequestration from Florida International University, to control another waste stream: the carbon dioxide from its smokestacks. Mr. Saxena’s involvement will help the company apply for a grant from the Trade and Development Agency in the United States for the next project that Mr. Sivaprasad would like to build: a plant that would absorb 1,200 tons of trash a day and produce 10 megawatts of power in the southern Indian cities of Chennai or Bangalore.
“Some improvement is coming in, and with American money I can clinch a project,” he said. “This has taken a very long time.”