Beer breweries all across the US have become stalwarts of renewable energy, using everything from solar energy to waste-to-energy methods to make the brewing, canning and distribution process more energy efficient. The following are a few breweries making major investments in renewable energy.
The majority of this Colorado-based beer maker’s energy comes from on-site power generation methods. Those include: biogas and solar. As their website states: At our onsite Process Water Treatment Plant in FTC, microbes clean all of our production waste-water through a series of aerobic and anaerobic basins. A byproduct of this process — methane-rich biogas — is harvested and piped back to the brewery, where it powers two combined heat and power (CHP or co-gen) engines. We’re literally turning waste into energy. Our AVL Process Water Treatment Plant is under construction and will also generate biogas. We have 1,235 solar photovoltaic (PV) panels covering the roof of our Packaging Hall in FTC. This equates to just about 300 kilowatts of electricity, or roughly 4.5% of our FTC annual electricity needs. Our AVL Liquid Center has a 19 kilowatt PV array adorning its roof, which helped the building to earn LEED Platinum Certification. A solar hot water system on the roof of our AVL Brewery uses energy from the sun to create hot water which we utilize in domestic applications, like our kitchen and restrooms. More >>