H-POWER Facility Expansion

The City and County of Honolulu on the Island of Oahu in the Hawaiian chain has been taking steps to reduce the need for landfilling and to continue to be self-sufficient for waste disposal. For an island, having the capacity to process all of its waste is crucial and producing power helps reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels. The City and County relies upon its waste-to-energy facility to manage the waste stream. The existing H-POWER Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Facility, which has been in operation for about twenty years, is a 2,000 ton-per-day (tpd) refuse derived fuel (RDF) two-unit plant with a single condensing steam turbine generator. Recent actions to enhance and expand the H-POWER Facility have been undertaken to ensure the needs to the island will be met for the foreseeable future. Enhancements and an expansion of the existing H-POWER Facility have begun and are well into construction. The enhancements will improve environmental performance and reliability and the expansion will add nearly fifty percent to the facility capacity. When complete, the expanded facility will have a number of unique features that will improve its ability to manage more types of municipal solid waste. The facility expansion will utilize mass burn technology in a single 900 tpd combustion unit with an associated turbine generator. The expansion unit will feature fabric filters for particulate control and state-of-the-art Covanta Very Low NO_x (VLN™) technology intended to reduce NO_x emissions well below that achieved with conventional selective non-catalytic reduction (SNCR) used at many other WTE plants in the USA. Independent of the expansion, the existing facility has been retrofitted with new fabric filters and induced-draft fans, which offer greater particulate and heavy metal control and improve control of other emissions. The existing facility is also getting much-needed improvements to boost reliability for many years to come. When the expansion comes on line, the facility will reliably generate about 7 percent of the island’s electrical power as opposed to 5 percent from the current 2,000 tpd of waste processed. This paper explores progress to date on the revitalization of the H-POWER Facility and its expansion.