Waste to Electricity Generation in Thailand: Technology, Policy, Generation Cost, and Incentives of Investment

Abstract

Waste-to-Energy is a challenging management in developing countries. There are many different technologies to generate electricity or heat from wastes. However, reuse and recycling are first prioritized as left a fraction of waste can be used as energy recovery. The initial cost to generate electricity from solid waste incineration is prohibitively high due to its cost of advance technology and the cost of equipment to control emissions. Thailand is agricultural based country and has experiences of many technologies to utilize waste to energy. Landfill gas and thermal gasification are increasingly interesting alternatives to municipal solid waste incineration and it is recommended that biogas technology is suitable and is cost effective in management of organic waste or animal manure waste. This research studied in existing technologies in terms of electricity generated from waste, long term government policy, carbon dioxide reduction, electricity cost production and incentive investment. Until recently, Thailand has generated electricity from waste of 47 MW, from the target in 2021 with target capacity of 400 MW. Since Thailand has an incentive investment of electric power generated from renewable sources and wastes in terms of feed-in tariffs it can motivate private investors to invest and produce electricity to the grid. To generate electricity from waste it also has potential in reducing CO₂ reduction and creates more potential jobs. In various agricultural based industries such as palm oil industry, cassava industry, in animal farm and in landfills gas have potential to generate electricity in Thailand. In case of landfill gas with the installed capacity of 3.0 MW, it can generate electricity of 13,492 MWh per year and produce potential of selling carbon credits of 60,532 ton-CO₂ per year.