St James Gate Brewery saves €70,000 a year with state-of-the-art hybrid coolers

Over 680MWh of energy has been saved, resulting in a reduction of over 400 tonnes of CO2, as a well as a financial benefit saving the site €70,000 per annum.

In a fast track project, the Manufacturing Excellence Engineering Team, along with the Site Operations Team worked with npower Business Solutions (nBS), to identify an number of energy saving opportunities including, the installation of hybrid coolers, the introduction of Variable Speed Drives (VSDs) on pumps, the upgrading of the water pump and VSD and heat recovery from the CO2 vaporisation process.

The team then worked with the SEAI and secured a €300,000 grant under the SEAI Better Energy Workplaces programme – a programme which disbursed €11 million in 2011 to co-finance 85 projects in the public, commercial, industrial and community sectors. Cumulatively this secured estimated savings of 270GWh and an abatement of 63,000 tonnes of CO2 with associated monetary savings of €11 million, effectively repaying government funding within 12 months.

The receipt of the SEAI Grant is owed to the strong relationship forged between St James Gate Brewery, nBS and SEAI. The SEAI Better Energy Workplaces grant scheme encourages companies to invest in environmental or energy saving opportunities in today’s challenging economic situation. Commenting on the project Robbie Linehan the Engineering Manager who was the project lead for St James Gate Brewery said: “With the assistance of the SEAI, our utilities partner nBS has in a very short period of time been able to deliver a group of projects that have exceeded our expectations, realising impressive energy and CO2 emission savings that support our challenging energy conservation targets going forward”.

Colin O’Brien the Site Operations Manager congratulated nBS for its ability to deliver the fast track project and for completing the work with no safety issues and no interruption to product or services over the period.