Waste-to-energy: “Ekurhuleni has been behind us in a big way”

Inspiring interview with green entrepreneur Tony van Til, CEO and owner of Quispiam Renewable Energy (PTY) Ltd, who has managed to close a PPA with the Ekurhuleni Municipality to build a waste-to-energy plant.

Let’s start with some background about your company and your current projects.
My company is called Quispiam Renewable Energy and it used to be a bodyshop company in an IT environment. Then we transitioned into the renewable energy space in 2016. Basically it is a 10-year-old company that does renewable energy projects, and our biggest go-to is the Ekurhuleni project at this stage.

Ekurhuleni put out a tender in 2016 for a renewable energy programme. It comprised 48 different IPP licences, of which six were waste-to-energy. One was landfill gas and the rest were all concentrated solar and solar. And then, the licence was given out in 2016, adjudicated in 2017, and then by 2021 we got the power purchase agreement (PPA). We’re now waiting for the waste agreement to come through. And once the waste agreement comes through this month (May 2024), then we’re ready to go. We hope to reach financial close by October 2024, and then we have to do the build.

You were part of the pitch programme at Enlit Africa in Cape Town, how did it go?
(Laughs) I was quite nervous, but it went very well. I got a lot of interest compared to what we’ve had over the last few months. Everybody is starting to look at what’s happening with the just energy transition programme, all the money coming into the country to get us off fossil fuels. We hope to see some of that money come through to the municipalities. There’s meant to be about R320-billion allocated for municipalities. And if they’re clever, they would obviously look at us and fund us.

But there are other avenues of funding. We got Hitachi as our potential, very innovative technology partner. Hitachi got funding from their side as well, and then we’ll have three streams of income coming from this, which is carbon credits, gate fees, which is the tipping fee, and then the electricity side. We’ve got an off-taker which is a municipality with a 20-year contract where they will buy all the electricity we generate.

Is it a struggle managing carbon emissions in a green economy project?
I think it is not in this day and age. I think if we look back to when it started it was, because there was interest with everybody signing the Kyoto Protocols and Paris Accords and things like that. But nothing’s actually come from that. Now, after COP28 in UAE, where our government signed it, and according to the ANC’s National Development Plan, and beneath that is something called the IRP, the Integrated Resource Plan. The IRP speaks to the fact that 2030, municipalities must make 30% of their energy from renewable resources. They haven’t started yet.

Ekurhuleni is one of the first ones to start. So it will take us 2.5 years to build. So, we’re almost there to 2030. So good for Ekurhuleni on what they’ve done. They’ve been behind us in a big way. They pushed our programme, and, like I said, we hope that they get some money from government to do what they need to do. But it’s also an opportunity to get rid of the waste. You know, doing solar, doing concentrated solar is all good, but it’s limited. You have to have battery backup and what does a battery use? It uses cobalt, and you’ve got to mine cobalt.

So, we are in the fortunate position: We can generate 24 hours a day, where they can only generate 4 hours a day. We can generate in the peak hours, which gives us some maximum benefit and financial benefit. We are the primary focus of this programme, because Ekurhuleni has to produce 30% of its energy from renewable sources. It currently needs 2,600 MW in the summer and up to 2,800 MW in the winter per hour and 30% of that is around the 700 MW mark. They’ve only given out about 400 MW at this stage. We don’t have enough refuse or municipal solid waste to actually generate more. Of the six IPP licences, there are three of 33 MW and the others are 20 MW, 15 MW and 5 MW. For the 20 MW, 15 MW and 5 MW guys, financially it is not viable for them. We’ve got seven waste dump sites, so we’ve been allocated one or two of those waste dump sites, and then hopefully we can make a big change in the municipality with regards to getting rid of their solid waste.

We can use municipal solid waste, we can use tyres, which is a huge issue for most municipalities. They don’t know how to get rid of the tyres, because tyre recycling was stopped as we know in 2017, and they should start that up again. But 15% of our fuel could be tyres. Then we can use medical waste and other industrial waste. We can even use sludge from the sewage farms. So we can help clean up the sewage farms, which will be a good thing. Unfortunately, in our environment, the sewage farms are far removed from where we’ll have our waste building site on the waste dump, but you can transport that as an additional fuel source if you need it.

Also cleaning up the waste dump sites: last year we had an accident at the Simmer and Jack site where some of the waste pickers were killed on the waste dump site. Because what these guys do to earn a living, as soon as the stuff gets dumped, they look for the recyclable stuff. And this huge dump buried I think eight of these pickers, and something like 4 or 5 people unfortunately died.

In our project, we will take some of those waste pickers and we’ll formalise them and give them formal opportunities and bring them into our business as waste pickers in the business. Because what happens in our business is the municipal trucks come and dump directly with us no, longer at the waste dump site. And then we do sorting and shredding there and push it into the gasification plant. So, hopefully we’ll get rid of a lot of the issues surrounding the waste pickers.

Do you have any advice for other green economy entrepreneurs?
There’s so much to do. One of the projects we’re looking at next is probably in water, getting rid of sewage. I’ve teamed up with a group of guys that can make fertiliser from the sewage. I actually spoke to Joburg Water about 2–3 years ago, and they were really keen for us to start. But in our type of business, it always comes down to financing. If you don’t have some type of grant financing, you’re going to scrape by. But there are huge opportunities.

If you look around us here at in Enlit, there are huge opportunities. There’s technology, components, there are all those types of businesses that can make you a small entrepreneur or you can be a much bigger entrepreneur.

We’ve been very fortunate with our awardee because of the IRP, we’re hoping to see this rollout. We’ve had interest from Mpumalanga, and we’ve had interest from the Eastern Cape, because all the guys want to use our PPA, because it took 6 years to formalise it, and it’s taken 2 years to formalise the waste agreement, because it’s a 20-year programme. So, the Public Funds Management Act and the Municipal Funds Management Act only allocated for a 3-year tender. So, this all had to be renegotiated and all that to be redone. But it’s paved the way for other municipalities to actually get into this game as well now and help get rid of their stuff and also decarbonize slightly and maybe align with the government’s programme, with the COP28 signature, we will get rid of some of the carbon footprint. For every tonne of waste we get rid of, we get a carbon credit, which is monetised, so it’s perfect.

Unfortunately people don’t understand that we do need some of the carbon because that’s what trees and plants live off. But we need to get rid of the bad carbons and see if we can clean up our environment. Walking around Cape Town yesterday, Cape Town is one of the cleanest cities we’ve come across. I wish my city was like that but it is not. But it gives us the opportunity for people to pick up waste, bring it to us, get paid for it, and then we burn it, and we make power, which is awesome.