Assessment of electricity generation cost from landfill gas

Abstract

The paper deals with current trends in municipal solid waste management in Ukraine. Accumulation of significant amount of solid waste at landfills and the implementation of economic tools aimed at promoting electricity generation from landfill gas open wide opportunities to use landfill gas for electricity generation. However, despite the favourable conditions, nowadays a number of landfill gas power plants, which have been putting into operation in Ukraine, are insignificant. Given the fact that today the main economic tool for this sector development is the feed-in tariff, the estimation of cost for electricity generation from landfill gas and its comparison with the current feed-in tariff rate were carried out in order to understand, whether the feed-in tariff is sufficient to cover electricity generation. The study results have shown that the feed-in tariff for electricity generated from landfill gas is economically justified, and that non-price barriers slow down this sector development.