Veolia assumes operations at Canadian WTE facility

Veolia has assumed operations and maintenance of the Metro Vancouver Waste-to-Energy Facility, located in Burnaby, British Columbia.

The facility processes approximately 25 percent of Metro Vancouver’s waste, producing approximately 180,000 megawatts per year of electricity and recovering about 5,000 metric tons of recyclable metal per year. Metro Vancouver is also developing a district energy system that will triple the amount of energy the facility can recover, by using some of the steam generated through the combustion of waste to provide heat and hot water to up to 50,000 homes in Vancouver and Burnaby, Veolia says.

The five-year operations and maintenance contract, effective March 3, has two potential five-year extensions in the amount of up to $245 million for operations, maintenance and capital replacement work at the facility.

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“We are very proud to continue to work with Metro Vancouver to provide this safe, reliable and essential waste management service to the region,” says Denis Chesseron, country director and CEO of Veolia Canada. “As a global leader in ecological transformation, we don’t just want to provide a high-quality service. We want to establish increasingly efficient models based on our combined expertise.”

Veolia has operated in Canada since 1978, providing water, waste and energy services and technologies to municipal and commercial customers. In addition to the Metro Vancouver facility, Veolia also operates 60 other waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities globally that generate 5.76 terawatts of clean energy and 3 terawatts of heat, the company reports.

“Veolia is currently present in 44 countries around the world, and our goal is to capitalize on our experience to lead ambitious and high-performance projects,” Chesseron says. “This is what we are doing here in Burnaby. In line with our GreenUp strategic program in which local low-carbon energy production is a growth booster, we are using our expertise to help develop a system that will triple the amount of energy recovered by the facility to provide heat and hot water to the local network.”