The Ayrshire Coast in Southwest Scotland is already famous for being pretty green—from the fairways of the Royal Troon Golf Club (frequent location of the British Open) to the rugged Galloway Hills. Legendary Scottish distiller William Grant & Sons, which operates the Girvan Distillery and the adjacent Ailsa Bay Distillery in Ayrshire, has been upping the green there in recent years by installing GE equipment onsite that generates flexible and cost-efficient electricity and also reduces carbon emissions.

Grant’s and GE Energy announced that a fourth Jenbacher gas engine will be installed at the Girvan Distillery, the home of Grant’s Scotch whiskey and Hendricks’s Gin. The Ecomagination-qualified Jenbacher J620 gas engine will create 3 megawatts of additional power while reusing CO2 that is normally emitted as waste during the manufacturing process. Even cooler, the J620 will operate on biogas created from residual malt materials used in the distillation process to create alcohol – that’s some green whiskey!

Grant’s is just one of GE Energy’s global food and beverage industry customers. Anheuser-Busch InBev and GE announced a strategic alliance to develop innovative manufacturing solutions to increase energy efficiency and reduce water use at 33 breweries in China. By helping AB InBev understand how to use installed equipment more efficiently, for example by experimenting with gas engines to generate electricity using biogas or natural gas, the partners expect cost savings of $9 million per year and a reduction in CO2 emissions of 150,000 tons per year. Even more importantly, lessons learned on the brewery floor in China will be applied to improve efficiency, cut costs and reduce emissions for GE Energy’s food and beverage customers around the world.

Source: General Electric