Powered by hot water: Ocean Spray’s juice bottling plant achieves a first
Ocean Spray

Background

Ocean Spray is an agricultural cooperative owned by more than 700 cranberry and grapefruit growers in the United States, Canada and Chile. The cooperative is the world’s leading producer of cranberry juices, juice drinks and dried cranberries, and Ocean Spray® is the best-selling brand in the North American bottled juice category.

Ocean Spray is the leading producer of canned and bottled juices and juice drinks in North America. Since 1981, it has been the best-selling brand name in the canned and bottled juice category.

In April 2014, Ocean Spray opened a new juice bottling facility in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. It was committed to constructing this 300,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility in a way that minimized its environmental impact, and then operating it efficiently with energy-conserving technology.

The plant annually produces more than 30 million cases of Ocean Spray juice beverages.


Approach

Ocean Spray partnered with World Energy Innovations during construction to develop a smarter energy model and design integrated energy systems for the entire facility to maximize energy efficiency and savings.

Additionally, World Energy Innovations:

  • Supplied the major energy equipment
  • Developed a sequence of operations
  • Programmed control panels
  • Provided Check, Test and Start services

The biggest energy savings resulted from installing a hot water boiler system rather than the conventional steam boiler model. World Energy Innovations optimized the cooling system designs and used cooling tower rejection energy to heat the facility.


Results

World Energy Innovations’ transformative energy systems have helped Ocean Spray achieve its energy saving goals for the new facility and earn the distinction as the first plant in the United States to run entirely on hot water instead of steam.

The rejection energy recovered enables the plant to use zero energy to heat the building during the winter.


“The big player here is our BTUs, our energy transfer systems. And the fact that we don’t use steam. The amount of energy it takes to convert water to steam the last few degrees is really wasteful. This is a huge innovation.

In fact, this is the only beverage plant run on hot water instead of steam. World Energy Innovations is making an investment in the utilities in this plant. It’s an incredible story for energy conservation. It decreases our carbon footprint, makes us energy efficient, and the equipment required to make hot water requires much less maintenance than steam boilers.”

Erich Fritz – VP, Engineering and New Technologies


In total, World Energy Innovations guaranteed savings to Ocean Spray of more than $1 million annually in natural gas, electricity and water costs.