In the first of many energy efficiency changes to come, Coca-Cola Hellenic and ContourGlobal have opened an advanced energy-saving power plant in Romania as part of an initiative to cut annual CO2 emissions across all of Coca-Cola Hellenic's operations by more than 20 percent. The initiative supports the European Commission's goal to meet a 20 percent reduction in emissions by 2020.
A Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant, constructed in partnership with power development company ContourGlobal, is installed at the Coca-Cola Hellenic bottling facility in Ploiesti.
This is the first of 15 plants that the company plans to build in 12 countries, including eight European Union member states. Coca-Cola Hellenic is one of the largest bottlers of Coca-Cola products in the world.
The development of the Ploiesti plant follows a pilot project in Hungary in 2006, which reduced CO2 emissions by 43 percent, which is equivalent to a 20 percent reduction across all 80 beverage production plants, well ahead of the 2020 deadline for emission reductions set by the European Union, according to Coca-Cola Hellenic.
The natural-gas fueled CHP plant supplies highly efficient, clean electricity as well as heat and cooling for the soft drink production facility. It also delivers clean electricity to the local grid, providing power to the surrounding community in Ploiesti.
The facility also features an intelligent, fully-automated warehouse, the first of its kind in Romania, according to Coca-Cola.
The Romania cogeneration plant is powered by two 3-MW J620 enbacher gas engines from GE Energy. Each of the cogeneration bottling plants will use GE's Jenbacher CHP engines, which will eliminate up to 40 percent of their annual CO2 emissions, according to GE Energy.
Coca-Cola Hellenic and ContourGlobal plan to open three more plants this year with others following in 2010 and beyond.
Under the first phase, GE Energy is supplying ContourGlobal with 19 Jenbacher gas engines, representing a total output of 58 megawatts. The first two were installed at the Romania bottling facility while the other units will be installed at Coca-Cola facilities in six other European countries: Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Greece, United Kingdom (Northern Ireland) and Italy.
Subsequent project phases call for additional CHP plants to be installed at bottling facilities in Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia and Nigeria.
