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 International, 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.

“Deltaway’s concept worked very well for us,” says Pim deVries, facility manager at Rozenburg. “Their specialists shared their substantial knowledge and made improvements that had a real impact on the bottom line, and became an important part of our team in the process.”

“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.