Brewery Vestfyen has switched from fossil fuels to biomass.

The former oil boilers has been replaced with a 4 MW woodchip fire steam boiler plant. The plant is able to deliver up to 6.015 kg steam pr. hour.

The brewery is medium-sized and produces over 120 million units of beer and soft drinks on bottle or can yearly. The brewery uses steam at 5 bar for a number of different processes, of which a few run around the clock, while most processes run between few minutes to 3-4 hours. The yearly energy consumption is around 30,000 GJ with highly variable energy consumption across the day.

Overcoming the challenge of variable consumption
The solution to overcome the challenge of variable consumption lies in the high-pressure boiler, which utilizes steam at 60 bar at 280 °C as well in designing the plant so the entire system acts as a spring for fluctuations.

The plant received a grant for the Danish Energy Agency and came to a total cost of EUR 2.05 million with a simple payback time of 2,6 years.

The plant was implemented in 14 month and has been producing CO₂ neutral energy since January 2015.

A turbine was possible to include in the plant for the production of electricity, but it was deselected due to operating hours in the production.

The fuel of the plant can be any kind of solid biomass, e.g. straw, straw pellets, wood chips etc.