FEATURE


BRITAIN’S BREWERS MARK A 10-YEAR MILESTONE IN ENERGY MANAGEMENT


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oday’s enterprises are increasingly concerned about the impact of their operations on the environment, and how to balance environmental benefit with cost - the ‘LeanCarbon’ dilemma. But as long ago as 1999 the brewing industry was preparing for the introduction of the Climate Change Levy which ushered in a new world of energy taxes for the first time. The British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA) responded positively by devising early LeanCarbon methodology to monitor energy use and efficiency, and by 2004 the Association appointed David Sheen as Policy Manager, Economy and Environment.


Carrots and sticks


“Carbon footprinting was only on the periphery a decade ago,” remembers David, “so we were focussed on the production facility. It’s the most measurable and it’s where the biggest savings could be made. But of course audit is now spread more widely across the supply chain.” At this stage the agreement between government and the industry was voluntary, with a ‘carrot’ of significant tax discounts on climate change levy as an incentive to get involved. “But over the decade EU emissions trading schemes have started to become more punitive and schemes such as carbon reduction commitment have come along,” says David, “and that is pure ‘big stick – no carrot.


Watershed


The industry encountered a watershed in 2010 with the Industry Energy Efficiency Accelerator programme. This was the end of the first phase of climate change agreements, and the Association immediately applied to take part on behalf of its members. If phase one was about taking the obvious steps towards efficiency then phase two heralded a step change in assessing what technologies the industry could use to make some big bites into a brewery’s energy use.


Rather like an action movie trailer bellows: ‘They’re Back – and This Time it’s Serious!’ the BBPA realised the need for outside expertise and called in Will Todd, a boffin contracted by the Carbon Trust who became managing director of consultancy


Richard McCann raises a glass to their success and investigates and how other sectors are now implementing ‘LeanCarbon’ methodology.


Carbon Architecture. “This was the first time we’d had a sector-wide energy balance calculation,” remembered David. “Every year we fed the data we’d collected back to our members so they could compare their own results against the industry average and their peers. This was the first step to benchmarking and promoting technology throughout the membership.”


Then, in 2011, government came to the


Association and announced a new scheme starting in 2013 with a new targets for the brewing sector of a 19.1% energy efficiency saving!


“That was a huge figure,” says David, “many breweries are in historic buildings, and in even the most modern brewhouse there’s only so much of the process you can change without affecting the beer!” Will Todd and his team, on behalf of the


Association’s members, took a very precise look at overall energy technology within the sector and how that affected energy efficiency. Will constructed a 110-point questionnaire for every brewery to look at what they were using in their own plant and he then went through a forensic process to examine how the sector was performing and how individual parts of the sector were using technology.


Independent Expert Assessment


For the first time the Association now possessed an independently-assessed technology benchmarking matrix showing technologies that were already in use within the sector and which technologies suggested by government were inappropriate. It also examined what brewers thought they could be installing within the short, medium and log terms. “All that information enabled the BPPA to go back to government on behalf of the whole industry and demonstrate how we had commissioned an independent in-depth expert assessment of the sector and we proved that the potential was a whole lot less than 19.1% but that there were gains to be made,” explains David.


“This triggered a significant discussion ENERGY MANAGER MAGAZINE • MARCH 2016 17


on behalf of the industry, which represented a very significant saving in terms of time and money if each member had been forced to negotiate individually.” It clearly wasn’t easy - agreement was reached with government on Christmas eve for a scheme that started 1 January – but the Association, on behalf of all its members, finally renegotiated the target down from 19.1% to a 13.6% energy efficiency measure, “because government accepted that our counter-proposal was not because we didn’t want to comply,” explains David, “but we were coming back with hard facts from an in-depth study which showed precisely what was realistic and achievable and what was not.”


And what of the future? Other industries have watched the


BBPA’s achievements in a diverse sector and are now following their model – the British Soft Drinks Association has now signed up to InMetriks.com methodology and the British Meat Processors Association has also called in Carbon Architecture to replicate much of the LeanCarbon work achieved for the BBPA.


Ben Orchard, Environmental Sustainability Manager at Adnams plc, agrees that with intelligent planning, audit and metrics, government can be convinced by expert evidence and energy reduction legislation isn’t the threat it might initially appear: “Rather than view ESOS as a burden we used it as an opportunity. In the end it did return opportunities we had not identified before, proving useful for us”.


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