Abstract: To improve the utilization efficiency of municipal solid waste, two new types of waste-to-energy plant coupled with coal-fired power plant were proposed. In the proposed system, the heat generated by the waste incineration was transferred to the coal-fired power plant for efficient utilization according to the energy level matching principle, and the preheating process of the primary and secondary air of the waste incineration boiler was optimized. Based on a 500t/day waste-to-energy plant and a 350MW coal power plant, the proposed system and the reference system were modeled by EBSILON Professional software, and the systems were compared and analyzed from the aspects of thermodynamics and economics. In addition, energy analysis and exergy analysis were utilized to explore the energy-saving mechanism of the proposed system. The results demonstrate that, as compared to the reference system, the waste-to-electricity efficiency of the new system is improved by 8.02 and 10.17 percentage points, the dynamic payback period is reduced by 3.15 and 3.51 years, and the net present value is increased by 79.74 and 106.84 million yuan, respectively, during the operating life of the system.