The CAVIRO company is a world leader in improving grape quality at vineyards of its winegrowers cooperative. The high product quality is guaranteed by meticulous selection of grapes. Today the group boasts a production capacity that is one of the highest ranking in Italy and 32 member wineries, 11,500 winegrowers and a cultivated winegrowing area of ​​over 31,000 hectares. In addition, thanks to this organisation, more than 80% of its produced wine comes from members’ vineyards.

Cefla Engineering was responsible for setting up at the production plant a “turnkey” cogeneration system — using a 1.5 MW Jenbacher engine package fuelled by natural gas, to produce electric power, steam and hot water for self-consumption — serving the phases of wine storage, final fermentation and bottling. The cogeneration system was built following a technical/economic feasibility study that was conducted in collaboration with Cefla and reported the following key characteristics:

• Annual production cycle of over 5,500 hours
• The plant requires more than 3MWt of steam
• Hot water (produced locally using steam) is used for heating the product during the bottling and storage/last fermentation phases.

Specifically, Cefla implemented the following:

• Exhaust gas line with a system of energy recovery from combustion gas for the production of steam
• Heat dissipation system supplying hot water from the engine cooling circuit
• Low and MEDIUM VOLTAGE electric system
• Supervisory system designed to allow electric, thermal or manual plant control.

CEFLA also installed the plant fluid distribution network (steam, hot water), medium voltage cables and data network allowing complete system energy monitoring. Beyond the economic benefits — resulting from energy source savings offered by cogeneration plants — the supervisory system allows CAVIRO to monitor major utilities connected to cogeneration, and thus allows daily management of the production cycle adjusted according to energy consumption. This highly customisable system led CAVIRO to choose Cefla Engineering again for performing energy audits of this plant and of 4 additional production plants.