New green practices at Summit

Carey Matthews at Summit emailed me a link to their newsletter detailing some of the things that Summit is doing to move towards a greener brewery. Its good to see they are making some changes to be more sustianable.

" Some of the projects that we have taken on as a way to reduce usage are small and at times may seem unnecessary. On the other hand some projects are massive in size, effort, and capital investment. A recently completed small project is the addition of motion detector light switches in the bathrooms and timer switches on the upper non occupied levels of the brewery to reduce the lighting costs when no one is using these spaces. This project was relatively inexpensive and will pay itself off in just a few months. We also recently completed a change of the heating times and temperatures for the facility. This required us adding a number of sensors and some PLC controls, but by making these changes we reduced our heating bills by 14%. This project was somewhat more expensive, however, the payback was almost immediate. In the summer of 2007 we added a series of automated air valves in the facility to shut down the plant air to areas when plant air is not necessary. This may not seem like much of an issue, however the air comes from a 100 horsepower compressor so reducing its run time dramatically reduces energy as well as maintenance costs. Additionally, we are in the final stages of installing a new 120 ton SMARDT chiller unit for our glycol system that maintains the temperature of the tanks during fermentation. As part of this project we will also be using the return glycol to maintain temperature and humidity in our packaging area as a way to reduce the amount of waste packaging. This project is 1 year in the making and has been challenging; the technology is relatively new so a lot of engineering had to take place to make this system work efficiently. Our capital investment for this project was more than $250,000 and the payback will take awhile, but the reduction in energy use will be extraordinary. The new SMARDT chiller uses approximately .6 KWH/ton verses our original chiller that uses approximately 1.8 KWH/ton. This unit is 120 tons and the old unit is 100 tons, so doing simple math, if you take the new unit and run it at 70%, the electricity would cost approximately $1839.50 versus the old chiller at $5016.82 per month. You may ask why didn’t we buy a better, more efficient unit to begin with and the answer is simple, the technology just did not exist in 1998 when this unit was purchased. Upcoming 2008 energy projects also include installing high efficiency fluorescent fixtures throughout all production areas which will greatly reduce energy usage and heat load. In September we will be installing a system to utilize outside air during the winter months to keep the beer cold in the cooler instead of using mechanical cooling, thus reducing energy costs as well as reducing run time on current equipment."

Check out more information at: http://www.thesocialelement.com/
Salud!
The Bearded Brewer