Electricity, net export (generation less own use)

What it is

Per 1 t of mixed municipal solid waste (wet) burnt on a moving grate in an EU plant at BAT, with a heat recovery boiler, a back-pressure turbine and 1.7 bar(a) steam to a district-heating exchanger, semi-wet lime FGC, SNCR and activated carbon. Net electricity and net heat are the products; the waste arrives burden-free. Waste composition, energy, reagents, residues and air emissions from the WI BREF (2019) ranges; N2O and CH4 from IPCC 2006 (Vol. 5 and Vol. 2).

Reference product

1 kilowatt hour of Electricity, net export (generation less own use)

CAS

not available

Code

waste-incineration-1:msw-incineration-grate-chp:product:electricity

Dataset

msw-incineration-grate-chp version 0.1.0 · UUID 4fd62852-b8bd-52c1-8cd0-75fef52aea97

Activity UUID

not available (the library assigns none; use the code)

Database

cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4 (version preview-a3c52e4)

Process

Waste incineration with energy recovery (mixed MSW, moving grate, heat-oriented CHP)

Geography

RER · background inputs with a site rule link at the user's site location (default DE)

Time period

2001 · valid until 2019

Technology

moving grate (about 90 % of European MSW installations), 40 bar steam, back-pressure CHP, semi-wet FGC with quicklime, SNCR with ammonia water, activated carbon injection, bag filter · level current

Boundary

gate-to-gate: waste bunker, grate furnace and boiler, turbine, flue-gas cleaning; up to the residues leaving the site, the electricity at the plant fence and the 1.7 bar(a) steam delivered to the district-heating exchanger (the exchanger and the network are outside)

Classification

ISIC Rev.4 3821, 3822 (taxonomy/families.yaml (ISIC Rev.4) of the process's families)

System model

attributional, cut-off (docs/system-model.md, methodology 1.1.0)

Allocation

exergy, 49.3 % of the dataset to this product (rule deviation, from mappings)

Net electricity and net heat of one CHP steam cycle, not the products of one separation, so hierarchy step 2a (physical-exergy) does not name this case. docs/system-model.md section 2 allocates exported heat as a co-product by energy or exergy, documented per process, never credited. Exergy is chosen because the two leave in different thermodynamic qualities (work, and heat as condensing 1.7 bar(a) steam at 115 degC to the district-heating exchanger, the boundary), which energy content would treat as equal. The products are in kWh, so the WBCSD price-ratio rule (per kg) does not apply. Exergy per kWh is in the dataset's product properties (electricity 3600 kJ; heat the Carnot factor at the boundary temperature).

Rights

CC-BY-4.0

Exchanges per 1 kilowatt hour of Electricity, net export (generation less own use)

As exported: allocated and scaled to the reference product. Provenance: 6 given, 16 calculated. Pedigree scores (1 best, 5 worst): reliability, completeness, temporal correlation, geographical correlation, further technological correlation.

Elementary flows

Where these numbers come from: each exchange names its source above; the dataset is processes/waste-incineration-1/lca/datasets/msw-incineration-grate-chp.yaml in library version a3c52e4.

Used by

No other activity of this database links to it.

How good it is

Review

Not reviewed: no LCI review record yet

Data quality

not available

Mass and carbon closure

Not available: a hand-written dataset: no lca/manifest.json records its balance

Change report

Not available: this build has no change report against an earlier release.

KPI benchmark positions

How to use it

Downloads

• cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4.xlsx · bw2io ExcelImporter workbook (bw2io 0.9 Excel layout) · the whole database
  code waste-incineration-1:msw-incineration-grate-chp:product:electricity
• cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4-olca-jsonld.zip · openLCA JSON-LD (olca-schema) (2) · the whole database
  process 4fd62852-b8bd-52c1-8cd0-75fef52aea97 (processes/4fd62852-b8bd-52c1-8cd0-75fef52aea97.json) · the dataset's unallocated multi-output process; this product's allocation factor is in it
• cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4-multifunctional.json · Brightway 2.5 multifunctional database (JSON, for the multifunctional package) (cheme-as-code/lci-multifunctional/v1) · the whole database
  code waste-incineration-1:msw-incineration-grate-chp · the dataset unallocated, with all its products; this product is its desired_code
• cheme_as_code_lci-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl · the installer

A file with this activity alone is not available: each file above is the whole database, and the line under it says how to find this activity there.

import bw2data as bd
from cheme_as_code_lci import install

bd.projects.set_current("my-project")   # holds your licensed background + biosphere3
install("cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4.xlsx", background="ecoinvent-3.11-cutoff", location="DE")
activity = bd.get_activity(("cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4", "waste-incineration-1:msw-incineration-grate-chp:product:electricity"))

While any exchange of the database has no mapping, install() writes nothing and only lists the unlinked exchanges. So the last line finds no activity until the gaps are mapped: the download section gives the ways to use the database now.

How to cite

Electricity, net export (generation less own use), from Waste incineration with energy recovery (mixed MSW, moving grate, heat-oriented CHP) (dataset msw-incineration-grate-chp 0.1.0), ChemE-as-Code Process Atlas LCI database preview-a3c52e4, activity waste-incineration-1:msw-incineration-grate-chp:product:electricity. Cite the Process Atlas paper (in preparation, 2026), by Artur M. Schweidtmann and Jana M. Weber, and the ChemE-as-Code Process Atlas LCI database version preview-a3c52e4.

DOI: none yet (the Process Atlas paper is in preparation)

@unpublished{schweidtmann_process_atlas,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M. and Weber, Jana M.},
  title = {{Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title)}},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://atlas.cheme-as-code.org},
  note = {in preparation}
}

@misc{schweidtmann_cheme_as_code,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M.},
  title = {{ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering}},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2611.07947},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07947}
}