New power plant section opened in presence of Environment Minister Tanja Gönner - future of location secured - Euro 117 million invested in sustainable waste management - contribution to protect environment and conservation

The official opening of the new waste-fired boiler No. 6 represents a further highlight for the Mannheim-based energy company MVV Energie and its environmental energy subsidiary MVV Umwelt in their successful track record of using waste for the environmentally-friendly generation of energy. Following a construction period of just 25 months, Dr. Georg Müller, CEO of MVV Energie, Tanja Gönner, Environment Minister of the State of Baden-Württemberg and Lothar Quast, Environment Mayor of Mannheim, ignited the first waste fire in the boiler at the push of a button. With this Euro 117 million facility, which replaces two boilers commissioned in 1965, MVV Umwelt has invested in securing the future of its Friesenheim Island location, as well as in sustainable waste management.

"Household and commercial waste is an important resource for the future if we make sensible use of the material and energy potential it contains. We have been one of pioneers of this seminal idea for around 50 years already. By building this new power plant section we have safeguarded the competitiveness of energy generation from waste at the Mannheim location", commented Dr. Müller to 200 guests from the worlds of business and politics invited to attend the ceremony. This would ensure that waste disposal for the entire region remained economical and highly ecological in future as well.

Environment Minister Tanja Gönner praised the extension to the plant as a forward-looking measure. "It's important to recognise that waste isn't just worthless rubbish, but actually a valuable source of raw materials." The extension to the plant had accounted for this new approach in the waste industry in exemplary fashion. Waste incineration was used both to generate electricity and for the surplus heat thereby produced. This enabled the waste to be optimally exploited for energy purposes, thus also contributing to climate protection. "Waste is replacing fossil fuels." As one of six energy from waste plants in Baden-Württemberg, the MVV Umwelt plant played a key role in the state's waste business, stressed Gönner.

Lothar Quast also highlighted the "ideal combination of waste disposal and energy generation", which also retained and created jobs at this location, providing it with a secure future. At the same time, the Mannheim plant made a key contribution towards achieving self-sufficiency in terms of waste disposal in Baden-Württemberg. It also guaranteed high disposal reliability while meeting the highest environmental standards. The operation of the energy from waste plant and the neighbouring biomass power plant alone enabled around 277,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year to be avoided in Mannheim.

Depending on the calorific value of the refuse, between 200,000 and 230,000 tonnes of waste can be incinerated in the new boiler every year. The plant has its own bunker. In parallel, the two existing boilers earmarked for municipal refuse will continue to be supplied with fuel via their own bunker. "The separation of the bunkers means that waste can be optimally allocated to the incineration lines at the energy from waste plant in Mannheim in line with its calorific value", remarked Dr. Hansjörg Roll, Technical Director of MVV Umwelt, thus underlining key advantages of the innovative plant concept.

MVV Umwelt is relying in this respect on flexibility. The new boiler can incinerate waste with so-called mid-calorific values of 7.5 MJ/kg to 14.6 MJ/kg. "The energy thereby released from the waste is used to produce steam, which is in turn used to generate electricity based on the efficient and environmentally-friendly cogeneration process", added Michael Class, Commercial Director of MVV Umwelt. In parallel, around 15 industrial customers in the north of Mannheim are supplied with an average of 65 tonnes of process steam an hour.

MVV Energie acted early to seize the opportunities offered by the entry into force of the Technical Guidelines for the Disposal of Municipal Solid Waste (TASi) in June 2005. The Group, which has thus strategically combined disposal and energy generation in its business model and now has a capacity of 1.4 million tonnes, has in recent years become a market leader in this field in Germany.

Within the MVV Energie Group, the wholly-owned subsidiary MVV Umwelt pools core competencies in the field of decentralised energy generation from household and industrial waste and biomass. The waste-fired cogeneration plant in Mannheim commenced operations in 1965 already. Following several rounds of expansion in 1997, 2003 and most recently 2009, it now handles waste from more than one million residents in the Rhine/Neckar region, sustainably protecting resources by using intelligent materials flow management. The launch of operations at new boiler No. 6 has boosted the location's capacity by ten percent.

Overall, the Group operates waste-fired cogeneration plants at three locations in Germany, namely Mannheim, Offenbach and Leuna (Sachsen-Anhalt). Alongside industrial waste, the company disposes of non-recyclable waste for 19 local authorities with a total population of around four million. To this end, the Group has invested more than Euro 600 million nationwide in the past ten years alone.

Moreover, the biomass power plant in Mannheim also uses the infrastructure at the adjacent energy from waste plant, which has been in place for 45 years now. It thus forms an integral component of MVV Umwelt's location on Friesenheim Island. A total of 126,000 tonnes of old timber are incinerated at the biomass power plant every year, generating 160,000 megawatt hours of CO₂-neutral electricity. Further biomass power plants are located in Flörsheim-Wicker near Wiesbaden and in Königs Wusterhausen just outside Berlin.

Waste-Fired Boiler No. 6 - Facts and Figures

Construction period	October 2007 to November 2009
Calorific value	12.5 MJ/kg
Thermal output	87 MW
Steam parameters	40 bar / 400 °C
Fuel throughput rate	25t/h
Peak performance	31t/h
Capacity	200,000 to 230,000 t/a
Electricity output	24 MW
Investment costs:	Euro 117 million
Project manager	MVV O&M GmbH
General contractor	AE&E Inova GmbH, Köln

Mannheim, 2 December 2009