Intern Sustainability and Process improvements by reducing Energy Consumption

The complex production facility of FrieslandCampina in Veghel produces single ingredients like cream, caseinates, whey proteins, lactose and other products from raw milk and cheese whey. In the production processes of these ingredients, heating and cooling is obviously necessary, which makes the plant very energy intensive. Continuous improved on sustainability performance is essential in order to meet the ambitious targets.

In order to reduce the carbon footprint to be future proof as a plant, as well as reduce spendings on energy, it is key to be able to properly monitor the processes and keep track of how much energy is used in each of the unit operations, and in which process step. On one hand, this will allow for identification of deviations which increase our energy consumption. Proper insight in the cause is extremely important for plotting the right course of action to move back to the benchmark. On the other hand, monitoring allows for understanding where in the process optimization is possible, to further reduce energy uptake and improve the plants performance.

To this seemingly simple way of working, we need to add the complexity of the production process, which has many different recipes for different product, units  with different capacities and run times operating in batch and, as the single biggest milk processing plant in the network, stable operation is always required.

Currently, we are in the process of phasing out our current platform for energy monitoring and adapting the FrieslandCampina standard as a Energy Monitoring System, which generates new features and allows for different dashboards and make FrieslandCampina Veghel ready for a sustainable future!