Mackie’s is a 1600 acre Westertown farm located at Aberdeenshire, using green power to run their industry- including the byre, ice-cream dairy and chocolate factory.

This Scottish food industry produces 70% of its energy from a mix of renewable generation, with wind being the main source. They have four wind turbines with a total capacity of 3MW- 3 Vestas 850 kW and 1 Enercon 500kW Wind Turbine. A 10-acre site of solar panels with a total installed capacity of 1.8 MW-6,912 individual panels each with 260W capacity, in addition to a smaller array of solar panels on the byre roof, contributing to the electricity needs. Moreover, heating power for the office and houses is generated from a 400kW biomass plant.

A good mix of these power types is provided which helps producing peaks at different times and for achieving their goal to be a self-sufficient industry.

At Mackie’s, they are committed to good environmental stewardship and their company vision is to be a Scottish global brand from the greenest company in Britain created by people.

The current system still lacks dispachability to meet the peak energy demands and approximately 1.3 GWhr of electricity is purchased from the grid!

Several factors identified in the literature review will be adopted for the biogas plant as they are prerequisites for its production. These are the processes of hydrolysis, acidogenesis, acetogenesis and methanogenesis. Many factors are dependent upon each other as the selection of feedstock and type of fermentation are crucial for producing an effective system. The wet digestion fermentation will be adopted as it allows a wide variety of feedstocks regardless of their solid content. The main type of feedstock that will be used in the case study will be manure due to the location of the site being next to a dairy farm, but the use of wet fermentation allows the methodology to be applicable for sites where there is limited access to manure. The Mackie’s case study will produce a waste product from the ice cream manufacturing process that can be used in the anaerobic digestion process. The biogas plant will operate in the Thermophilic temperature range between 45-60 oC as it reduces the retention time and the reactor volume. The requirements of the site mean that a continuous process must be used as it allows for the stable production of biogas and is adaptable to various digesters, which increases the versatility of the methodology.

EIA was carried out to determine the impacts of our proposed system and its significance to the surrounding environment. The assessment was carried out with the use of matrices to determine the impact significance from every component. With the help of the matrix analysis, the cumulative impacts were assessed.