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| Energy
With the majority of America’s energy currently being produced by fossil fuel-fired power plants, the steam and renewable electricity generated by the nation’s 89 waste-to-energy plants are valuable commodities. These waste-to-energy facilities have a power generating capacity of nearly 2,700 megawatts of clean electricity. Unlike other types of renewable resources, waste-to-energy is considered base load power that operates 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. As a result, these facilities reliably generate approximately 17 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year—enough power to 2.3 million American homes. This accounts for nearly 20 percent of all renewable electricity generation in the United States. Today’s waste-to-energy plants are highly efficient power plants that utilize municipal solid waste as their fuel rather than coal, oil or natural gas. Far better than expending energy to explore, recover, process and transport the fuel from some distant source, waste-to-energy plants find value in what others consider garbage. Waste-to-energy plants recover the thermal energy contained in the trash in highly efficient boilers that generate steam that can then be sold directly to industrial customers, or used on-site to drive turbines for electricity production. The renewable electricity produced at these facilities is so valuable that Congress included waste-to-energy in the Section 45 Production Tax Credit to encourage development of waste-to-energy and other renewable technologies.
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