Timarpur Lessons Unlearnt

Timarpur 6 MW waste to energy project is being undertaken by by Timarpur Waste Management Company Pvt. Ltd, a subsidiary of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd at Timarpur, Delhi. It is based on Ministry of Science & Technology's TIFAC patented technology for RDF preparation, capable of processing 650 Tons Per Day (TPD) of MSW.

The estimated GHG abatement is tCO2 eq. 686,992. It has received host country approval.

The project was due to start on August 2006 and get completed in April 2008. The project has not been completed as yet.

The project has named itself as an integrated municipal waste processing complex which includes Biomethanation plant and Sewage Treatment Plant, capable of handling 50TPD of green waste and 6 MGD of sewage. Power plant of 6 MW capacity The total annual electricity export to the grid will be 28.08MU.

Project owner and proponent is D.K. Mittal, IAS Chairman Timarpur Waste Management Company Pvt. Ltd C/o. Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd .

Some 18 years after the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) shut down its waste-to-energy power plant at Timarpur, efforts are on to revive it just to benefit from clean development mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol to earn carbon credits. Its real purpose is not waste management and the Union Ministry of New and Renewable Energy underlines that waste management does not fall under their jurisdiction, energy generation is their driving concern.

What it chooses to remain oblivious of is that started in 1990, the RDF plant at Timarpur was based on a technology imported from Danish firm Volund Milijotecknik. The plant was designed to incinerate 300 tonnes of municipal solid waste every day and generate 3.75 mw of power. Later it was realized that the Delhi waste didn’t have enough calorific value and the plant was shut after 21 days of operation.MCD would have us believe that now, the calorific value of the waste has increased over the years and the plant is bound to work this time.

The proposed technology has been developed by the Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council(TIFAC), New Delhi, which will help to generate 6 mw of electricity and produce 69,000 tonnes of refuse-derived fuel after treating 650 tonnes of waste everyday.

This technology is based on incineration, which will lead to serious air pollution; it also disqualifies the project for CDM benefits.

The project has already received environmental clearance from the Union ministry of environment and forests. On May 23, 2006 it got listed before the CDM executive board of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and was open for comments till June 21, 2006. As per the project design document, it will cut down over 1.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. The document is misleading because the project does not meet the additionality criteria and is an emitter of Green House Gases, heavy metals and Persistent Organic Pollutants.