A plant with many uses: Company burns garbage, finances public transit

2/3/2002
provided by Wisconsin State Journal

If Wisconsin's biggest power companies didn't have shareholders, could they build a transportation system to rival the best in the world?

It sounds far out, but it happened in Germany.

Stadtwerke Munchen, a city-owned utility that serves 1.3 million people in Munich, uses profits from its power operations to subsidize a massive transportation system that includes commuter trains and buses. Enno Ihnken, managing director of the company, said the utility's power operations contribute some $150 million per year to the cost of running the transportation network.

The source for a significant portion of the city's power supply is unconventional, too.

Ihnken told members of a Wisconsin group studying power that the city burns 675,000 tons of garbage each year to produce electricity; included in that total is about 135,000 tons from neighboring communities. The trash helps meet as much as 10 percent of the city's total electrical demand.

So, what's the price for such a system?

Ihnken said customers of this utility pay 13.5 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity, depending on whether they have signed up for higher usage during off-peak hours. By comparison, Wisconsin customers paid about 7.6 cents per kilowatt hour during 2000, the last year for which statistics are available from the state Department of Administration's energy bureau.

Overall, German customers spend about 5 percent or more of their incomes on energy, said Gerd Kaulfuss, manager of the Dresden municipal utility. Wisconsin residents spend about 3 percent of their household income on energy, according to the most recent statistics from the state Department of Administration's energy bureau.