McCain’s cuts refrigeration costs with low harmonic ABB drives

One of the UK’s leading manufacturers of frozen foods is using ABB low harmonic variable-speed drives to cut its site load from 7 MW to 6 MW.

The McCain Food’s plant at Whittlesey, Peterborough, is the UK’s largest chip factory, producing 30 tonnes of frozen chips an hour.

The company was looking for further ways to reduce its energy consumption and costs at the factory and wanted to replace its old refrigeration facility with modern equipment. The on-site cold store, which operates 24/7, accounted for 60 percent of the site electrical loading. The company also wanted to get better control of the refrigeration plant and reduce the potential impact of harmonics.

Benefits include direct connection to the network, with no complex multi-winding transformer required and no need for external filter equipment. The drives exceed the requirements of EN 61000-3-12 and IEEE519 and offer genuine unity power factor with no compensation needed.

The new refrigeration plant cut the number of compressors from 20 to seven. ABB installed seven variable-speed drives, with ratings ranging from 350 to 650 kW.

Overall, the new refrigeration plant using ABB drives cut the site loading by around 1 MW.

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