Industry uses around 30% of the total energy consumed in the UK. The percentage of energy used, in relation to the cost of production, varies from sector to sector, in food and beverage manufacturing this equates to approximately 15%.
We have been working with a food processing customer to ensure they save waste heat and generate more of their own energy, to increase efficiencies and reduce their energy spend and cost of production.
Manufacturing processes such as injection moulding, food cooking, machining, casting, chemical production, refining and others that generate or require heat, are likely to also need cooling. The cooling requirement produces waste heat that can often be captured and converted to energy.
There have been significant advances in technologies to recover energy from waste heat, which in turn increases the viability of their implementation. By applying these technologies to our customer environments, we are finding there are some real financial advantages.
For our food processing customer, we delivered an Energy Efficiency Appraisal and here are just some examples of the technologies recommended for installation and changes to practice. These changes could reduce their core cooking process costs by over 80%.
Our first focus was on energy / heat recovery. We reviewed the current processing methods and as well as ways to capture the heat from the wastewater cooking, to pre heat the water required for the next cooking batch. We combined this with:
a further preheating solution powered from the PV electricity previously being exported to the grid.
recovering heat from the flue gases with specialised heat exchangers.
using the captured heat to power a newly developed micro Organic Rankin Cycle (ORC) generator, which could produce more renewable electricity and reduce the running costs of their walk-in chillers.
We next looked at energy generation:
Micro Organic Rankin Cycle (ORC) generator - a combination of the recovered waste heat and the previously exported energy from the Solar PV, enabled us to recommend a newly developed micro 20 kW ORC.
Micro Wind Turbine: The site has a good average wind speed and clear sight into the prevailing south westerly winds. We reviewed the current micro turbines available and presented suitable vertical and horizontal axis machines from 5 to 50 kW. (In recent years, the small wind turbine market has undergone a significant degree of change. It was therefore important to recommend not only the strongest technical options but also companies offering local installation and support capabilities).
Solar PV – the arrays that had been originally installed in 2011 and 2017 had an export rate that was considerably less than their contracted supply rate. We recommended using this electricity for additional pre-heating of the water for the cooking process, so achieving further reductions in the core cooking costs.
For this customer, we were able to introduce some new, cutting edge technologies, that blended with their existing infrastructure, allowed them to make some real savings from their energy spend. Get in touch here for further information on this, or how we could help you.