The Anheuser-Busch brewery in Fort Collins has rejected a $1.1 million experimental energy grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to replace lead-acid batteries on its fleet of forklifts with cleaner fuel cell packs.
The grant, announced a year ago, was part of $41.9 million in federal stimulus funds awarded to 13 companies to develop and deploy fuel cells.
Implementing the technology in A-B’s forklifts would have provided a “real-world” look at how fuel cells perform with daily use.
Grant recipients were expected to match the DOE funds, and A-B indicated the additional costs were too high.
“A thorough project analysis revealed additional costs, and we decided to dedicate our resources to other clean- energy projects that have better, more efficient use in our business,” Kevin Fahrenkrog, A-B’s Fort Collins manager, wrote in an e-mail.
The company did not respond to further questions about the grant.
Fahrenkrog cited A-B’s other clean-energy projects, including installation of a molecular sieve, which increases ethanol, a byproduct of the brewing process, to a higher proof, allowing it to be directly blendable with E85 flex fuel, selling fuel crops grown at its Nutri-Turf farm to a local ethanol plant and decreasing water use by almost 32 percent.
Fahrenkrog said the efforts have contributed to a 27 percent decline in fuel use in the past five years.
Department of Energy spokeswoman Tiffany Edwards said in a voicemail message that during “negotiations” with A-B, the company decided not to go forward with the grant and referred all other questions to A-B.
Fuel cells promise to provide green energy storage for everything from electronic gadgets to cars, but getting the right chemistry and keeping the manufacturing costs low are tricky to do, the DOE said in announcing the grants in April 2009.
Fuel cell companies have found some success deploying their products for back-up power systems and industrial equipment such as forklifts, the DOE said. So the government is using the $41.9 million to support those
