However, a quiet discussion was certainly not the case at the CEWEP (Confederation of European Waste to Energy Plants) meeting at the IFAT international trade fair, which I had the honour to attend as one of the speakers and a representative of the Czech market.
Where does the Czech Republic, which I spoke about at the meeting, stand in waste management? From the chart below, you might get the impression that nothing is happening at all. However, the exact opposite is true and it is something incredible.
But I’ll start first with what we want to achieve as a country, and that’s described in a similar chart released by the Department of the Environment in 2021. As can be seen, the ministry was already expecting a 2x increase in ZEVO capacity next year, which will certainly not be the case. However, the change in the Waste Act, combined with several other external influences, has brought about a major change in the Czech Republic’s development to date.
The resulting capacity is not far from the truth, just a little later. The following is a realistic scenario for the increase of ZEVO capacity in the Czech Republic, based on projects that are actively implemented in the Czech Republic and have a high chance of success due to their need in the region, access to funding and political support.
So what actually happened? First of all, the new Waste Act introduced a ban on the landfilling of recoverable waste with a calorific value above 6.5 MJ/kg. That wouldn’t be major news, especially since the original ban worked with a 2024 deadline. More importantly, the introduction of the sorting discount and landfill tax, which disadvantages landfilling and already achieves market parity with the WEEE. There will still be a significant increase by 2030, and this is of course a strong motivating factor. It is uncertain whether this alone would be enough to bring about such a radical change in the Czech Republic. I consider it more of a guarantee of predictability of a part of the market.
What has been the real catalyst, from my perspective, is the killer combination of the price of emission allowances and natural gas in the heating industry. The existing operation of larger sources, which in the Czech Republic are still based on the production of heat from coal, has been facing for several years now a complex problem of how to diversify heat sources and escape the emission allowance. If I do not want to stand only on sources using electricity, biomass or the use of waste are logical options for larger sources. However, the biomass market is becoming very difficult to predict, especially after the new EU Renewable Energy Directive, which implies a significant tightening of the criteria for biomass that can be used for energy.
It is thus a completely logical step that the construction of ZEVO has started to expand massively in the Czech Republic and I am glad that the ORGREZ Group and especially our company EVECO Brno is present in many cases.
This dilemma will soon be faced by the entire energy market when the EU ETS Directive 2 comes into full force, when emission allowances will also apply to sources below 20 MWt. We already have a recipe for this problem www.zeleneteplarenstvi.cz
Jan Krišpín, CEO of ORGREZ