Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[Music]
>>Alexi: Today, I’m fortunate enough to be in Fort Collins, Colorado,
home to the New Belgium Brewing Company,
one of the largest and most successful microbreweries in the United States.
New Belgium is unique not only because of its high level of automation, but also because
of its commitments to green practices and environmental stewardship.
Of course, New Belgium makes great beers, like the popular “Fat Tire Amber Ale,”
but it does so operating in the most eco-friendly ways possible. Let’s take a closer look
and see how New Belgium does it.
To handle its extensive automation needs, New Belgium relies on Opto 22 SNAP PAC Systems.
The Opto hardware controls the facility's brewing processes, water treatment facilities,
sustainability efforts, and a lot of the building management.
To find out more, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Igor Valuyev, the Chief
Electrical and Automation Engineer here at New Belgium.
So first things first, where did the names “New Belgium” and “Fat Tire” come from?
>>Igor: As far as the name of our flagship product, “Fat Tire”, our founder Jeff
Lebesch, used to be an avid home brewer. When Jeff traveled through Europe, he traveled
through Belgium on a bicycle and fell in love with Belgian beer culture. At that time mountain
biking wasn’t very prevalent in Europe so people were asking him where did he get this
weird-looking bike. He came back home, brewed a beer, and decided to commemorate his trip
and called his beer “Fat Tire,” so that was a part of our culture, Belgian beers,
New Belgium Brewing Company.
>>Alexi: New Belgium’s founders created a company list of core values and beliefs.
Producing world-class beer was one of them of course, but high on the list was environmental
stewardship and honoring nature at every turn of the business. And we’re not talking just
a few recycling bins here and there. We’re talking about a company-wide dedication to
reducing their impact on the environment. Igor, can you tell us a little bit about the
energy management practices that you have here?
>>Igor: Everything that we do, everything that we engineer around here, we try to keep
environment in mind. Just as an example, we’re sitting at this table. This table is made
out of recycled wood, recycled tires, and old FED EX tubes as legs. That’s just one
of the daily examples. But from the controls and automation perspectives, we are proud
to be the first wind-powered brewery in the United States. Whatever it doesn’t come
from the wind farm comes from our co-generation unit. It’s also controlled by the Opto 22
system. Our brewing system is one of the most efficient systems in the world. We are also
right now involved in a joint partnership with our local utilities to work on load shedding.
That allowed the local utility
to save a lot of resources on building substations throughout the area.
>>Alexi: Going green is of course good for the environment, but it’s interesting to
see that it doesn’t have to be bad for the bottom line. For example, you save over $3,000.00
a month in your electricity bills. Where do you find that savings?
>>Igor: The process water treatment plant is taking our waste stream, which is very
biologically intense, and those little bacteria multiply, they eat up the biological particles
and produce methane, which in turn we collect and with giant balloons on our property, and
burn this gas with our co-generation unit, thus producing electricity and shaving our
peaks at the same time.
>>Alexi: Making beer seems like it’s a very water intensive process as well. How have
you reduced your water consumption?
>>Igor: By being able to first of all monitor our water consumption. And currently we are
at one barrel of beer to four barrels of water, which is a very, very good number in our industry.
And automaton helps because we can make our processes very precise. By doing so we can
make usage of our water more efficient.
>>Alexi: I understand you have over ten thousand points of I/O. What types of things are you controlling?
>>Igor: Literally, with our ten thousand points of I/O, we control everything throughout the
brewery. From the brewing processes to CIP’s, to filtration processes to building processes.
And steam generation, our cold glycol generation, our process water treatment facility and
our utilities, some of our IT processes interacting with our UPS systems. The goal of
the system is to keep the temperatures, the pressures, the flows, the times at a very
precise rate, as well as being able to adjust recipes on the fly. There are numerous PID
loops throughout the facilities. There is a lot of discreet control, a lot of pumps,
valves, sophisticated metering devices. We also have some interfaces to our lab and quality
measurement system. So all of that together comprises a successful brewery like we are.
>>Alexi: Right, and these are complex PID loops. You’re often doing cascading PID loops?
>>Igor: Yes, there is certain devices that require, they’re actually high-speed devices,
for example our “Variomill,” which allows us first of all to make the product better
but also makes it safer, so as we’re milling, we're adding water, which basically we’re eliminating
dust, which makes our process much safer.
Our SCADA system, our HMI, is Wonderware InTouch and the system kind of has a dual purpose.
One purpose is for the operators to interact with it so we try to basically replicate whatever’s
in the real world, and that system is also used for education to people who go on the tours here.
Currently, the Wonderware system is communicating over Opto’s OPC Server, using Ethernet through
the PAC system. Pretty much, everything that the control system has, is brought into the,
at least the Data Historian and stored in something like a Microsoft SQL Server Database.
From there, this data is being consumed by our ERP, by our Track and Trace system, by
our KPI modules, by the lab systems and all those databases are integrated, so it’s
very cohesive system all together.
>>Alexi: I understand the bottling and packaging system is controlled by a more traditional
PLC system. Do you have any plans to have that system talk to your other systems in the facility?
>>Igor: As a matter of fact, we are currently working on a project that will establish communications,
seamless communications, over Ethernet between Rockwell, Allen Bradley system and Opto 22
PAC system. So far, we’ve done factory acceptance tests on it and the results were very favorable
and we succeeded passing factory acceptance tests for that particular project. Our packaging
hall is 100% Ethernet based. It’s also, we are using a lot of wireless technologies
from Cisco that allows our maintenance personnel to troubleshoot our systems without any wires.
More and more control systems are integrated with their IT systems. And in our case they
are. They are truly integrated with our IT systems all the way to the ERP system that we have.
>>Alexi: You recently finished a conversion process where you converted legacy Opto 22
equipment to the newer SNAP PAC systems. Why did you do that and how did the process go?
>>Igor: Opto hardware is very unique. First of all we are using, you know pretty much
looking at New Belgium, you can look at Opto’s history. We are using from the very first
generation of I/O that Opto 22 had offered, the Optomux system, all the way to the most
cutting edge I/O that Opto’s offering right now, the PAC System. And you can imagine that
everything in this brewery used to be controlled by old legacy system, and doing that, doing
the conversion while the brewery is running live is a very difficult task that we were
able to accomplish with very, very, minimal disruptions to the process and production.
We saved a lot of money. We saved literally millions of dollars by keeping our existing
legacy I/O and upgrading the brains if you would, of the systems, the controllers of
the systems to the new control architecture.
>>Alexi: And that original Opto is still running?
>>Igor: Yeah, that original Opto is still there. It’s still making us money. It’s
still making beer.
I’d like to thank New Belgium for brewing great beer so we can enjoy and feel good about
drinking, and for providing refreshing examples of corporate and environmental responsibility.
And thank you for watching. Be sure to visit Opto22.com for more information and to check
out our other great Opto videos. Cheers!