Sustainable into the future
Environmental protection and sustainability have always played a major role at Wittigsthal. But it is not just the product range that should incorporate this maxim. The entire production site is also being modernised in terms of energy and technology to meet the challenges of the coming years.
As early as 2014, we started to cover roof areas in the company with photovoltaic modules for our own power supply. This resulted in almost 500kWp in several construction phases. The administration building was also fitted with PV modules and a 30kWh battery in order to be as self-sufficient as possible. This enabled us to consume 76% of the electricity produced on our roofs ourselves.
Due to the economic upheavals of recent years, planned projects cannot currently be realised. Among other things, this is due to supply problems with batteries, the lack of technical solutions for hydrogen storage and the grid operator's blockade behaviour.
Back in 2020, we started to switch the heat supply from gas/oil to biomass. This project was completed in June 2021. The 1000kW gas/oil firing system was converted to a biomass system with a total heating capacity of 750kW. We were able to replace 441,000 kWh of fossil energy with biomass energy in 2021 and 1,117,000 kWh in 2022. in 2023, we expect to generate 95% of our total heating energy requirements with biomass.
To obtain the biomass we need, we work together with local building and road maintenance companies, regional sawmills, biomass plants and the Sachsenforst forestry organisation. These supply us with material from road tree maintenance, wood chips/wood shavings from wood processing and regional beetle wood.
We have been operating our own pellet production facility since 2022 and use the supplied material to produce wood pellets in DIN A Plus quality. We use these to supply our pellet heating systems, which have been heating parts of the site for several years.
The production capacity of our pellet plant is at least 440 tonnes per year. As our own consumption is 40 tonnes per year, we want to market the free quantities locally in the medium term. In this way, we can also offer other biomass customers a regional supply.
Regional and with brains - that's how small and medium-sized businesses can manage the energy transition without coercion and regulation!
