According to the chairman of the cooperative, Stefan Lindner, 9000 farmers are the owners of Austria’s largest dairy cooperative.
The plant in Feldkirchen im Innviertel will be supplied by a wood chip plant from December. Further biomass power plants will follow in Klagenfurt and Voitsberg. There is currently a critical period until May next year, by which time the largest location in Aschbach will have reduced its dependence on natural gas to a tenth of its energy requirements, says General Manager Josef Braunshofer. Until then, the following applies: “If we don’t have any fossil gas, Aschbach will be 70 percent.”
From spring 2023, in addition to a biogas plant, which is combined with the much larger sewage treatment plant that opened yesterday, a wood chip heating plant will also be ready, says Braunshofer. These climate investments cost 37 million euros, 7.3 million come from state environmental subsidies and the investment premium. In order to ensure security of supply, old oil burners are temporarily put back into operation in the drying plant in Ried and at the Klagenfurt site.
There are also energy saving measures. The 15 percent demanded by the EU the day before is not easily possible, said Braunshofer. In Feldkirchen, a large number of individual measures have succeeded in saving ten percent of the energy within a year – above all with heat recovery.
Profit margin is getting smaller
But the dairy cooperative is currently also concerned with inflation. The raw milk prices to farmers are 40 percent higher than last year’s prices, and butter is more than 30 percent more expensive for consumers. “For us, this means a slight decline in the margin, which is well below one percent of sales. So we’re not swimming in money,” says Braunshofer.
Source: Nachrichten
