Understanding even a bit more on how you spend your money on powering your brewery could lead to savings on your bill, which means more money to spend toward bettering your brand in other aspects.
Noah Schierenbeck, an Energy Advisor at The Utilities Group in Cincinnati, shared with brewers recently at the 2022 Ohio Craft Brewers Conference a few tips on how smaller breweries can look to save half a penny or even up to two cents per kilowatt-hour.
A lot of it comes down to determining your brewery’s capacity. Schierenbeck recommends real-time metering, which you can install on your electric meter.
“It sends data directly to your phone or laptop, you can get up-to-date, live information,” he said. “That’ll give you a great screenshot of how these peaks are occurring.”
Finding peaks in your energy usage can lead to great savings. Schierenbeck said that companies will estimate power usage by metering and using that as the basis toward billing. So if you lower your company’s power peaks, your overall bill can be reduced.
“On utility websites, if you’re a large enough user, you can have on-peak/off-peak data, which will show you exactly when you’re peaking and at what time,” he said. “When you’re on peak, which is usually during business hours, or it’s off-peak, which is usually late at night.”
Doing something simple like not turning on everything at once when starting a brew day can help. Turning every piece of equipment on one at a time to cycle up can help reduce load factors. The same goes for turning on heating units in the winter or air conditioning in the summer. Try to cycle through each unit if possible.
Renewable energy is a popular topic, but it can be less than worthwhile if you install solar panels to power your brewery if you are turning on units before the sun comes up.
”Renewable energy credits are becoming more and more popular,” Schierenbeck said. “They are a credit for somebody else and the solar panel, a wind turbine and you’re buying that credit to supply that electricity to you.
“It can be incorporated into a supply contract. So if you go through suppliers, they all have renewable energy credit options for you.”
Photo courtesy Dancing Gnome Brewing
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