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Waste-to-energy

An interactive economic model of an energy-from-waste plant — watch trucks tip waste, the furnace burn it and power flow to the grid, see the gate-fee vs power-export split, and run the investment case live.

Interactive model
Environmental & Waste · Waste-to-energy

What an energy-from-waste plant earns — twice

An energy-from-waste (EfW) plant gets paid twice for the same tonne: councils and businesses pay a gate fee to dispose of residual waste, and the plant then burns it to generate electricity it exports to the grid. The gate-fee leg is a long, contracted annuity (waste keeps coming); the power leg carries merchant price risk. It's a baseload processing machine, so the case turns on the plant's capacity, the gate fee it commands, and where power prices land.

600
£110
£80
LIVE
Gate fee paid per tonne of waste in Combustion furnace burns the waste Power export electricity sold to the grid Operating cost O&M, residue disposal
Flows — annualised from current assumptionsper year
Revenue p.a.
£0
£0 / hr
EBITDA p.a.
£0
0% margin
Revenue / tonne
£0
gate + power
Waste processed
0
33 MW export
Stocks — what the flows accumulate intolive
Power exported · session
0
at 33 MW
EBITDA banked · session
£0
accumulating in real time
Implied enterprise value
£0
at 10× EBITDA
Where revenue comes from Total £0 p.a.
Gate fees
Power & metals
Why investors like EfW: the gate-fee leg is a rare thing — a long, contracted, often inflation-linked annuity underpinned by the simple fact that residual waste has to go somewhere, with high barriers to building new capacity. That stable core de-risks the asset and supports solid leverage. The power leg adds upside (and volatility): when wholesale prices spike the plant prints money, when they fall the gate fees still carry it. The risks are operational — plant availability and outages — and, increasingly, carbon costs on the fossil fraction of the waste.
Revenue streams£0 p.a.
Operating costs£0 p.a.
Investment case — should you buy it?DCF returns

Year-1 financials flow live from the simulation above: revenue £0 and EBITDA £0 p.a. Set your deal terms below — the unlevered IRR (asset return) and levered IRR (return to equity, after debt) recompute instantly.

Operating

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Valuation & hold

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×
y

Financing

×
%
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Unlevered IRR
—
asset / project return
Levered IRR
—
return to equity
Equity multiple
—
MOIC over hold
Equity gain
—
exit equity − invested
Equity cash-flow profile£m · ■ invested   ■ returned
Projection — £m per year

Illustrative model. Represents a merchant/contracted energy-from-waste (EfW) plant running baseload. Revenue = gate fees (tonnes processed × gate fee) + power export (tonnes × net MWh per tonne × wholesale price) + a small metals/heat recovery line. Operating costs (plant O&M and residue/ash disposal per tonne, fixed labour & overheads, insurance & business rates, a maintenance reserve) scale partly with throughput; the gate-fee leg is contracted and stable while the power leg carries merchant price risk, so the entry multiple is lower and leverage more modest than the contracted PFIs. EBITDA = revenue − operating costs; excludes upfront construction capex, carbon costs and senior debt service. The investment case is a simplified DCF. For illustration only — not investment advice, and not any specific asset.