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

×
%
%
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.