Energy Academy
Sector: Food & Drink/Energy Management in Food Manufacturing
Sector11 lessons · 122 min

Energy Management in Food Manufacturing

How a food factory uses energy line by line, specific energy per tonne, and the cooking, freezing and heat-recovery opportunities the sector reliably offers, capped with a full factory energy audit. Assumes the Food & Drink Foundations course.

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01The Food Factory & Where Energy Goes

  1. 01The Food Factory, Line by LineIntake to despatch: how cook, chill and clean shape a food factory's day, and why its three energy centres are heat, cold and hot water.10 min
  2. 02Cooking, Baking & Process HeatOvens, fryers, retorts and pasteurisers: where the thermal energy goes, and why regeneration makes pasteurisation astonishingly cheap when it's designed in.10 min
  3. 03Chilling, Freezing & Cold StorageBlast and spiral freezers, the latent heat hiding in every tonne of product, and why freezing costs so much more than chilling.10 min
  4. 04Fundamentals CheckQuiz on the food factory's process flow and its heating and freezing loads.5 min

02Energy Use & Benchmarks

  1. 01Specific Energy: kWh per Tonne of ProductNormalising by production, why cross-subsector comparisons mislead, and building the per-tonne baseline that makes a factory's performance measurable.10 min
  2. 02Compressed Air, Vacuum & Packaging LinesThe electrical loads around the process: pneumatics, vacuum packing, conveyors and the packaging hall's quiet consumption.9 min
  3. 03Benchmarks & Hygiene CheckQuiz on specific energy, washdown loads and site utilities.5 min

03Efficiency Opportunities in Practice

  1. 01Heat Recovery in a Food FactoryThe refrigeration plant rejects heat all day while gas heats washdown water every night: connecting the two, and the other recovery pairings worth checking.11 min
  2. 02Hands-On: Two Quick DiagnosticsTwo short factory call-outs: washdown water heated by gas while the refrigeration plant throws heat away, and a freezer defrosting on a timer nobody questioned. Calculate, diagnose and prescribe the fix.12 min
  3. 03Efficiency in Practice CheckQuiz on heat recovery pairings and cold-plant operating habits.5 min

04Capstone Project

  1. 01Capstone: Audit a Food FactoryA full, staged energy audit of a fictional chilled ready-meals factory: scope it, walk the lines, build the production-and-weather model, and rank what you find.35 min