The Beachcomber Catering company specializes in the manufacture of meal trays for airlines. The company has a production capacity of 15,000 trays of meals a day and employs 225 people. Because the firm has to to comply with strict hygiene standards and the cold chain, all raw materials are checked on arrival, temperatures respected, and procedures followed until delivery to the aircraft. The company recovers heat from compressors and chillers to produce hot water in place of water heaters which consume a lot of energy. This heat energy which is given out by these massive machines would otherwise go to waste.
In the Mauritian tropical climate, the use of cold storage consumes a high amount of electricity in business operation. The long-term objective of the Programme National d’Efficacité Energétique (PNEE) in Mauritius was to facilitate the development of a market for quality energy efficiency in Mauritius. PNEE established energy audits as the cornerstone of its vision and carried out about a hundred audits
The PNEE programme is a public private partnership between the Ministry of Energy and Public Services, Business Mauritius, the French Development Agency, SWITCH Africa Green and the European Union developed to protect the environment and to enable companies to achieve substantial savings on energy costs to improve their competitiveness. The corner stone of the PNEE is to audit specific energy uses and its action plan was funded through SWITCH Africa Green in order to ensure a quality energy efficiency market.
An energy audit was undertaken around sites, most of which are equipped with several cold systems. The auditor was able to reconstruct the annual consumption of each of the main systems, making it possible to better target priorities. Given that it is the refrigerant compressors that are the main items of energy consumption, this was an important exercise. The report of the audit established the share of consumption associated with auxiliaries such as fluid distribution pumps, evaporator fans, pumps and fans associated with condensation, all of which represents up to 35 % of consumption for the cold storage.
The findings showed that the total electricity bill MRs per year was 13, with the bill for the cold electricity use coming to 8.5 MRs per year as a result of the project intervention. There was a potential gain of 11 MRs annually with potential profits climbing to 13 percent against an investment of 0.9 MRs. Most importantly some 232 units of GHGs were avoided and the total CO2 emissions per year was avoided.
“The energy audit that was commissioned was timely as it confirmed Beachcomber Catering’s approach to the PNEE, especially concerning the renewal of its equipment especially at the level of refrigeration” Clive Chang of Beachcomber Catering said. “We have already initiated steps for the renewal of compressors and condensers that have very low performance. I have to say that the audit was done in a very professional manner, the auditors were up to the task and they also allowed us to see our existing facilities from another angle”
