Food Industry

Reduce Water Heating Costs

The food industry is heavily dependent on fossil fuels and significantly contributes to Green House Gas emissions.

The EscoPod can reduce CO2 emissions by 60% and save up to 80% on water heating costs!!

The EscoPod is a prefabricated thermal energy centre, incorporating turbine driven heat pump technology, that is delivered to your site and takes over from your boiler plant to deliver hot water at a fraction of the cost and with massive energy and CO2 savings.

Between processing, refrigeration, hot water and steam, the meat industry has a constant requirement for hot water. This high, regular demand for both heating and power make the meat industry an ideal candidate for the EscoPod.

ABP Food Group processes more than one million cattle annually at 20 sites throughout Ireland, the UK and Poland, and are one of Europe’s leading supplier of premium grass-fed beef. Like all meat processing facilities, they use large quantities of hot water to ensure plant and equipment is cleaned daily after each shift and for sterilisation and handwashing. This incurs the financial and environmental cost of heating this water!

As an innovative and forward-thinking company, who have a huge focus on sustainability, ABP knew their systems needed total reform and chose the EscoPod as the solution to their problems!

ABP Food Group

“We needed an innovative solution that would totally reform our heat generation and distribution network. And we found it. In the EscoPod” 

Installed in late 2015 in Nenagh, the EscoPod has resulted in a 20% reduction in CO2. It now provides 95% of the site’s heating requirements, replacing those heavy fuel boilers. It also generates electricity for the plant and helps recover heat from the refrigeration process to reuse elsewhere.

In effect, ABP Nenagh has eliminated its need for fossil fuels to generate hot water. It has also dramatically exceeded almost all its the sustainability targets within a single year.

The EscoPod

“The EscoPod outperforms all other thermal heating systems, making sustainability profitable.”

The EscoPod is a prefabricated thermal energy centre, incorporating turbine driven heat pump technology, that is delivered to your site and takes over from your boiler plant to deliver hot water at a fraction of the cost and with massive energy and CO2 savings.

EscoPod Payback Chart

Heat Pumps are tested when asked to deliver high temperature water, consume power that may not be available, and their economic feasibility is vulnerable to rising electricity prices.

The EscoPod delivers 90°C water; generates its own power; and is resistant to rising electricity prices.

How Does It Work?

The EscoPod “does it” by very efficiently recycling waste heat, adding renewable heat, and then polishing off with gas turbine technology to deliver the high temperatures needed. Unlike CHP, the focus is on thermal production, not electrical production.

Savings

The little electricity used in the process is generated on board, and surplus electricity is fed to the user. This saves enormous amounts of prime energy because all the heat generated from the electricity production is used, not wasted as in a power plant.

Reporting

The package is rounded off with sophisticated cloud-based data collection and reporting, that delivers not only financial and energy savings data, but a host of management data including usage of gas & hot water, performance against KPI’s, costs per unit production, etc.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the EscoPod a Trigeneration system?

Definitely not! It’s true that we can deliver a refrigeration/chilling output together with electrical and heat outputs. However, in Trigeneration, as it has become known, one of the outputs (heat) is consumed by an absorption chiller to generate the third output (chilling). The EscoPod has three distinct outputs:  refrigeration/chilling; electricity AND heat.

The EscoPod, as a system, integrates various technologies – some gas driven, some electrically driven and as such it hedges against variations in the ‘spark gap’. It will therefore not become a stranded asset like many competing technologies. In addition as utility costs change, the control system can manipulate the operation of the various components to optimise performance.

The normal delivery time from order to commissioning is about 4 to 5 months. Once the unit is commissioned, savings start to accrue immediately. Since the EscoPod is an integrated energy system it delivers the savings of a 3 to 4 yr energy project within 3 to 4 months.

Yes, it’s simple. Once the baseline cost of producing heat is established, by testing the existing system, it is easy to determine the actual performance of the EscoPod in comparison. The gas input, and the thermal and electrical outputs are all metered, and the necessary calculations are performed, and reported continuously. Independent verification, if needed, is welcomed.

We only claim what can be measured.

If you have a substantial water heating load, then your site is suitable. There is no upper limit.

The presence on site of a refrigeration or chilling system is a major benefit so industries such as food processing, pharmaceutical, as well as large hotels and hospitals would all benefit from the addition of an EscoPod.

With some basic data, we can very quickly provide a Preliminary Proposal that will allow you to gauge the attractiveness of the system. We can then perform more detailed analysis and select an EscoPod that is right for your site.

What is the primary output?

The EscoPod is a thermal system. Its objective is to deliver large quantities of hot water, with a great degree of recycling, and efficiency, all leading to a massive reduction in the amount of fossil fuels used and paid for, which delivers on the promise – Profitable Sustainability.

The verification of savings from many energy projects is difficult because of the many variables involved – higher or lower ambient temperatures; more or less daylight; higher or lower production levels etc. We’ve designed the EscoPod to be simple and measurable – the value of the outputs less the cost of the input gas is the basic measure. The Siemens Mindsphere cloud-based system is used to continuously calculate, display and report on financial and environmental savings, together with a host of operational data, all in a user-friendly dashboard presentation.

Maintenance costs, which are low to begin with, are price fixed for the agreed duration. As already mentioned, there are other real operational savings, but our simple philosophy is that if we can’t easily and transparently measure it, we don’t claim it.

Yes, on an ESCo contract basis we can finance the capital and ongoing operational costs of the system over a 10 year or 15 year lease. The benefits are that no upfront capital is required, and savings can be obtained immediately, at no risk.

Most of the work is done off site and the EscoPod is delivered as a prefabricated plant room, just requiring a plinth ideally located adjacent to the boiler/refrigeration plant rooms. Most of the interconnections can be installed with final tie-ins done outside of production hours so there is no production downtime.

Contact Us Today

Testimonials

Here’s what our clients had to say about our services:

“We needed an innovative solution that would totally reform our heat generation and distribution network. And we found it. In the EscoPod”. 

Installed in late 2015 in Nenagh, the EscoPod has resulted in a 20% reduction in CO2. It now provides 95% of the site’s heating requirements, replacing those heavy fuel boilers. It also generates electricity for the plant and helps recover heat from the refrigeration process to reuse elsewhere.

In effect, ABP Nenagh has eliminated its need for fossil fuels to generate hot water. It has also dramatically exceeded almost all its the sustainability targets within a single year.

(Source: Irish Food Magazine, 2017)

ABP Food Group