This project installed a series of energy efficient upgrades, including boiler economizers, improved boiler controls, and hot water recovery loops at five of Foster Farm's poultry production facilities. The project resulted in 458,050 Therms/year in reduced natural gas energy use and 2,665 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions at each facility.
Foster Farms is an American poultry company. It was privately owned from 1939 until 2022, when Atlas Holdings purchased the company from the Foster family. The company is based in Livingston, California, and maintains several California locations as well as a number of locations in Alabama, Colorado, Louisiana, and Washington. The company specializes in a variety of chicken and turkey products advertised as fresh and naturally locally grown in addition to cooked and prepared food.
The Foster Farms engineering team collaborated with industry leading service vendors including Energy Resource Company (ERC), Nexus Engineering, Solecon, and others to complete design and implementation of project activities. This included: 1) installation of boiler economizers that capture wasted heat from boiler stacks and transfer that heat to the boiler feed water tank, raising the boiler feed water temperature without the need for additional fuel usage, lowering GHG emissions and energy costs; 2) upgrading the boiler controls to provide more efficient boiler operations to achieve the same or higher boiler steam throughput at the same or lower energy use, resulting in lower GHG emissions and fuel costs; and 3) installation of a hot water recovery system to produce hot water on demand, reducing the amount of energy wasted and GHG emissions produced compared with the old system that utilized only steam produced by a boiler.
