When Oatly, one of the nation’s leading brands of oat milk, began a new facility construction project in Ogden, Utah, their main goal was to minimize waste in their energy-intensive oat milk production process. Recognizing the need to be energy efficient and interested in potential rebates for installing heat recovery equipment, the Oatly team consulted Dominion Energy’s ThermWise program.
Our team took a collaborative approach with Oatly’s engineers to review design plans and create a preliminary rebate report detailing the company’s future estimated energy savings and rebates. As an environmentally conscious brand, Oatly’s main concern was wasting heat during oat milk production. The process requires two rounds of heating and cooling treatments. To save energy, ThermWise helped Oatly incorporate a heat recovery design that utilizes hot and cold tanks alongside multiple heat exchangers to recover heat during the cooling process. It is also effective in preheating the heat treatment processes. Next, we installed energy efficient boilers that use waste heat recovery from exhaust gas (stack economizers) to minimize the natural gas required in the heat treatment processes.
From blueprints to their brand-new facility, we followed up with Oatly on a monthly basis for the duration of the entire construction process. Once the energy efficient equipment was installed, ThermWise verified the equipment and setpoints that would earn Oatly their largest amount of energy savings and rebates. Dominion Energy explains, “Participation in the ThermWise program typically provides businesses with five to twenty percent gas savings, if not more.”
Oatly plans to expand their operations and will utilize additional heat recovery with ThermWise to provide future energy savings. Next, Oatly and Dominion Energy hope to solve for wasted oat product in a food digester to produce renewable biogas.
