How Nuremberg’s waste-to-energy plant keeps emissions in clear view

How Nuremberg’s waste-to-energy plant keeps emissions in clear view

Inside the City of Nuremberg’s approach at its waste-to-power plant for minimized emissions and maximized output while staying true to its citizens

Turning waste into energy is a significant responsibility for any modern waste‑to‑energy plant. What’s more, it has become an essential public service – one that must protect both people and the environment while ensuring that valuable resources aren’t lost in the process.
 
The waste-to-energy process places high demands on operators and equipment alike because it must run reliably almost nonstop all while producing as few emissions as possible, and converting variable waste streams into steady, usable power.
 
When such a plant sits within a densely populated city, as in Nuremberg, responsible operation means keeping emissions consistently low, clearly measurable and transparent, even when doing so adds operational complexity.
 
For the City of Nuremberg, emissions monitoring is more than a compliance obligation, it’s a foundational part of maintaining trust with the local community. 

Emissions monitoring as part of daily operation

From the outset, the City of Nuremberg structured emissions measurement as an integral part of running their waste incineration plant.

Staying compliant and meeting regulatory requirements spurs any emissions monitoring, but Nuremberg’s plant aimed to create a state-of-the-art facility that could exist in harmony with its surroundings and community.

Monitoring needed to stay available through startup, load changes and maintenance activities, without interruption.

Philipp Woerner, Technical Engineer at the City of Nuremberg Waste Incineration Power Plant, began surveying continuous emissions monitoring systems (CEMS) options that would lead to greater efficiency, reduced downtime and maintenance needs, plus the ability to adapt to the plant’s needs for the long run all while keeping emissions monitoring highly accurate.

Starting in 2018, the city explored the need to replace outdated operations and devices in their plant, which was built between 2000-2002. From the outset, the relationship between the plant operators and the local community was strong. That posture emerged from how the plant was operated day after day, with minimal impact on its surroundings.

After canvassing options for the right CEMS system to achieve these ends, Woerner and Nuremberg selected ABB as their emissions monitoring partner, and the plant was equipped with three ACF5000 CEMS systems – one for each of the three incinerators at the plant.

As waste incineration becomes a bigger part of essential services, it carries unavoidable environmental and social responsibility. On top of that, it’s also a technically complex process that produces variability by design, as waste composition, load profiles and ambient conditions change continuously.

Treating emissions monitoring as an operating responsibility rather than a reporting function forces those realities to remain visible and manageable at the same time, something Woerner and Nuremberg were sure they could juggle with the right CEMS operations in place.
emissions-monitoring
Philipp Woerner, Technical Engineer, City of Nuremberg Waste Incineration Power Plant:

"We wanted a state-of-the-art system. Not because it sounds good, but because we are responsible for what happens here. We were looking for a system with no moving parts that was state-of-the-art and consumed less energy. The ACF5000 is robust and easy to maintain."

Digging in on maximized efficiency, minimized emissions and impact

Digging-in-on-maximized-efficiency
The waste incineration facility is situated just two kilometers from the heart of Nuremberg’s city center, with the closest building a mere 130 meters away from the plant’s chimney.

The facility houses three incinerators with a capacity of burning 12 tons per hour, adding up to the ability to burn 36 tons of waste every hour. Every incineration process takes about 40 tons of hot water to make steam for the electricity generator, and the plant itself is connected to the local energy supplier, Nuremberg Energy, making efficiency an even bigger priority.

The plant runs a highly optimized, closed-loop chemical process, and it is non-negotiable that their CEMS system can work in harmony with this.

The Nuremberg facility uses three water-cooled reciprocating Von Roll grates, each originally designed with a capacity of 10.5 tons per hour of waste throughput. The flue cleaning process includes an electrostatic precipitator, acid scrubber, neutral gypsum scrubber, an adsorbent entrainment step and an SCR catalyst for NOx removal. The acid scrubber produces 12% hydrochloric acid, which is neutralized in the wastewater treatment system, and the neutral scrubber produces gypsum as a by-product of the flue gas treatment. The combustion heat feeds a four-pass steam generator, and the process steam generated is fed to the combined heat and power plant of N-Ergie (energy supplier).

With an ACF5000 installed for each of the three incinerators, the decades-old plant actually outperforms modern waste-to-power plants.
waste-to-power-plants
Philipp Woerner, Technical Engineer, City of Nuremberg Waste Incineration Power Plant:

“Our emissions are lower today than the allowed emissions for a newly constructed waste incineration power plant. We have no problems with these limits. We are located in the middle of a city and want to keep it clean.”

Availability as a functional requirement

Continuous operation brings predictable challenges. Components age. Maintenance work has to be carried out without disrupting the entire process. External conditions introduce variation that cannot be engineered away entirely. In that environment, emissions monitoring is expected to remain online, not because availability is a performance metric in isolation, but because gaps in measurement create uncertainty that compounds quickly.

Moisture, acid gas load and organic components vary significantly in municipal waste streams, making continuous FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared) measurement a perfect fit for such a complex gas matrix.

FTIR measurement technology is a sophisticated analytical method used in continuous emission monitoring systems to detect and quantify multiple gas pollutants simultaneously. It works by passing infrared light through a gas sample and measuring the unique absorption patterns of different molecules, allowing real-time identification of compounds such as ammonia, hydrogen fluoride, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen chloride in industrial emissions. Unlike traditional single-gas analyzers, FTIR can monitor dozens of gases at once without requiring separate sensors for each pollutant, making it highly efficient for complex emission sources. The technology provides accurate, continuous data that helps industries comply with environmental regulations and optimize combustion processes. The minimal maintenance requirements make FTIR particularly valuable for harsh industrial environments where traditional sensors would fail.

Waste heat recovery, grate temperature control, and flue gas cleaning stages all depend on real-time readings of NOx, SO₂, HCl and CO, which shift quickly as waste composition changes.

At the Nuremberg plant, availability near 95 percent is treated as a working expectation rather than an achievement to be showcased. Monitoring needs to recover quickly after disturbances and continue delivering readable data without requiring extended resets or off line reconciliation.

This is not an abstract concern. It shapes how maintenance is planned, how spares are handled and how much tolerance exists for systems that behave unpredictably under stress.

Operating through disruption


No continuous process remains stable at all times. The plant operating team encounters failures, restarts and transients as part of normal work. None of these remove the obligation to stay within emissions limits or to understand what the process is doing in the moment.

In a rare occurrence, in July 2025 the plant encountered a fault in the system, with an error message late on a Saturday evening. Woerner reached out to ABB service and ran through options for a fix, but an onsite visit was necessary. By early Sunday morning, the problem was fixed and the system was back online again with only five hours of lost data, and no problems again since.

The ACF5000 supports continuous, hot wet measurement through these transitions, reducing the need for operators to infer what has happened after stability returns. The point is not that disturbance disappears, but that its effects remain observable while decisions are still being made.

With the ACF5000, Woerner said it exceeded every need they’ve had and expected to have in the future.
ACF-5000
Philipp Woerner, Technical Engineer, City of Nuremberg Waste Incineration Power Plant:

"If the system fails, you still have to operate. You still have to meet emissions limits. You cannot turn everything off and reset."

Technology as an enabler, not the point

The ACF5000 monitors up to 15 components simultaneously, including: HCl, HF, H₂O, CO, CO₂, SO₂, NO, NO₂, CH₄, NH₃, N₂O, H₂CO, O₂ and volatile organic compounds

The ACF5000 system uses a high-resolution FTIR spectrometer with onboard references for continuous validation, enabling vital (regulatory-necessary) QAL3 checks without test gases, plus an air-driven injector pump with no moving parts for sample transport. It reaches very low detection limits.

Its proven hot wet extractive method maintains stability during load swings and variable flue gas moisture – normal conditions in municipal waste combustion.

With the advanced level of monitoring and data accuracy stemming from ACF5000 installation, it allows operators to sustain measurement continuity and data integrity in even the most variable conditions.

Story by Habeab Kurdi 
ACF5000-1
Philipp Woerner, Technical Engineer, City of Nuremberg Waste Incineration Power Plant:

“It has a very, very tiny, heated room and doesn't need much energy. It uses no moving parts for the flow of the measurement gas, no membrane pump, just an injector. You just turn on the air and it works quite nicely. It’s very easy to do maintenance. It’s nice to have a running system without problems.”

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