Glenfiddich whisky-to-energy AD facility receives council approval

The AD facility will utilise spent malted barley and pot ale from the distilling process to generate biogas, which can be cleaned and injected into the national gas network or processed to generate electricity for the National Grid.

Receiving full approval from all councillors, Committee chairman Councillor Douglas Ross said: “This proposed development has been well managed by the applicant as can be seen by the fact that there were no objections to the plans.

“They have worked with the council to ensure this energy plant can be approved and built as quickly as possible to start generating electricity from this anaerobic digestion facility,” added Ross.

Last year, fellow whisky producer North British Distillery, based in Edinburgh, turned to AD to help solve a bottleneck in the back-end of its manufacturing operations.

The Scottish whisky distillery reported that it had reduced its CO2 emissions by around 9,000 tonnes per year through integrating AD into its production process.

Instead of investing in additional evaporation capacity to process the liquid by-products from the distilling process, which would have been energy intensive, the company invested £6m in a by-products plant to produce distillers dark grain pellets for animal feed.

Leigh Stringer