At the end of last year, ACCIONA and its partner were awarded the lead contract for the engineering, procurement and construction project.This was also the first capital investment that the company has made in a project of this kind.
The East Rockingham waste-to-energy plant in Australia, which ACCIONA jointly designed, constructed and financed, has been selected by IJ Global, the financial journal that specialises in infrastructure projects, as “Asia-Pacific Waste Deal of the Year 2019”.
At the end of last year, ACCIONA was awarded the lead contract for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC), together with its partner HZI.This was also ACCIONA’s first capital investment in a project of this kind, closing the financial deal last December together with its partners John Laing, Masdar, Tribe Infrastructure and HZI.
When completed, this AU$511 million (€320 million) plant will be the second large-scale plant in the country and will process around 300,000 tons of waste per year. This will prevent more than 300,000 tons of CO2 annually, equivalent to the pollution generated by around 64,000 cars.
The plant will have a net renewable energy production capacity of 29 MW, equivalent to the consumption by more than 36,000 homes, and will be located in the industrial area of Rockingham, some 40 kilometres south of Perth and seven kilometres from the pioneering Kwinana plant.
The plant itself will treat municipal waste from commercial and industrial sources.It will also recover around 73,800 tons of ash per year, which will be processed and used in asphalts and other construction materials.
The project also has financial support from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Australian organisation charged with supporting the country’s energy transition, which has committed up to AU$50 million (€35 million) to the project; and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), which is providing AU$18 million in recoverable subsidies for the project (€11 million).
ACCIONA is currently developing two other projects of this type in addition to the East Rockingham plant.In 2019, it won the contract to construct and operate a waste recovery plant in Aberdeen (Scotland) called the NESS Energy Project, with a treatment capacity of 150,000 tons per year and a budget of around €400 million.One year earlier, in 2018, it won the EPC contract for the first WTE plant of these characteristics in Australia, the Kwinana plant, worth AU$700 million (€430 million), which will process up to 400,000 tons of waste annually and has the capacity to generate 36 MW of electricity, equivalent to the consumption by 50,000 households.