One of the world’s largest waste-to-energy facilities recorded the best performance in nearly 40 years of operation, with help from Deltaway Energy, Inc., a major San Francisco-based waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities design and management firm. The performance improvement grew out of a five-year facilities maintenance and engineering contract between Deltaway and the Rozenburg WTE plant’s owners, AVR; KKR Capstone, London; and CVC Capital Partners.

In 2009, the owners of the Rotterdam plant invited Deltaway to audit the plant’s performance, which had been declining for several years. Deltaway was asked to manage the facility and assigned a full-time manager to oversee implementation of the resulting plan. Several previous plant managers had been unable to reverse the decline.

Using Deltaway’s proven methodology, the plant management team reorganized the boiler outage management and implemented a new boiler inspection program. They also launched a maintenance reliability program to reduce downtime, optimized the steam cycle for more power production, and modified the combustion control logic to stabilize combustion and reduce emissions and equipment wear.

In the end, the plan increased the facility’s steam cycle efficiency by 13 percent in just one year and reduced unscheduled downtime at Rozenburg from 9.2 percent to less than 5 percent.

“Once we demonstrated our capability to our client, good cooperation and mutual trust was established. Impressive results started to show very quickly,” says Francois Screve, Deltaway’s president.

Deltaway Energy, Inc. is a worldwide network of experts in waste-to-energy and biomass power plant operations and maintenance. The firm is headquartered in San Francisco, and has offices in Tampa, Florida; Vancouver, British Columbia; Hong Kong, China; and Strasbourg, France.