DEFA Tool

DEFA was designed to allow for an easy comparison of low carbon technologies. During our research we realised there was no “one size fits all” solution for distilleries as they are all very different. For example, they are based in a variety of locations around Scotland, both rural and urban and this gives different access to infrastructure and therefore different cost for commodities such as electricity and natural gas. There is also a wide range of capacities across Scotland with some distilleries producing millions of litres of whisky each year and others only a fraction. Distilleries also have different budgets available to spend on low carbon technology. Therefore, DEFA was created to allow distilleries to input their data and receive useful information on the operational cost, capital cost and the impact of each technology. There is also a lifecycle carbon emissions assessment done so that distilleries can see where their most significant emissions are coming from and the impact each technology will have on the total emissions.

Capabilities

The tool has been designed to be very flexible and can perform the following actions:

DEFA provides economic analysis of a range of renewable technologies for heating over a 25 year period which gives a bigger picture of return on investments in the future.
It can work with minimal input of whisky production capacity, but this means there will be some assumptions so less precise results should be expected. However, this allows future distilleries to plan ahead to which technology to go with.
It can also help the distilleries with their carbon reporting.
Within DEFA is the current capability of all distillery in Scotland making it easy for distillers to evaluate if partnership with other distilleries would be beneficial for them.
DEFA is very flexible for future changes for example, changes in electricity or hydrogen costs or carbon emissions in the future. It has a tab called parameters in the tool, which contains all the constant parameters used for calculations with their references. This can be altered to tailor specific distillery conditions.

DEFA Tool Download

DEFA Tutorial

Please unmute the video to hear the instructions. The button is in the bottom right