Royal Brewery launches green energy plant
A £17.5m biomass plant at Heineken’s Royal Brewery in Manchester will be officially launched today.
Lord Davies of Oldham, parliamentary under secretary of state for Defra, will officially launch the plant in Moss Side, which will burn spent grain and woodchips to generate both steam and up to 37,600 MWh of electricity a year, reducing the plant’s dependence on fossil fuels.
Heineken has also invested a further £17.5m in a second biomass plant at its John Smith’s Brewery in Tadcaster, taking the total investment to £35m.
The Manchester and Tadcaster biomass plants will together reduce carbon emissions by 30,000 tonnes a year which Heineken said is the equivalent to taking 21,650 cars off the road per year or saving the carbon emissions from 5,000 homes per year.
Construction on the biomass plants started in 2007 and they have been fully operational since October this year.
Stefan Orlowski, Heineken UK’s managing director, said: “Our new plant both here in Manchester and in Tadcaster will significantly reduce carbon emissions and provide us with renewable energy generated and used on site.
“Our investment in these plants builds on an already strong environmental record and we have recognised energy and climate change as a critical business issue for several years, reducing our carbon emissions by 14% since 2004.”
Heineken took over the Manchester Royal Brewery when it acquired Scottish & Newcastle last year.
In October it announced plans to cut around 10% of the workforce at the plant. Around 30 of the plant’s 300 staff face the axe, as the plant introduces a new shift pattern to improve its efficiency over the next two years.
