Maximising Your Solar Utilisation - Webinar Highlights
Thursday 5 December 2024
Once a farm has Solar Power installed, it is important to get the most out of the system. High on-farm utilisation increases the value of the system. Even before you install Solar PV, consider how you can structure your energy use to fit within cheaper tariffs and reduce costs.
Stephen Soutar from AEI Group has conducted a number of on-farm energy efficiency and microgrid assessments at dairy and horticulture farms. Stephen appeared on a QFF Microgrid Webinar in November 2022 and was the winner of the Energy Efficiency Council’s Best Agriculture Energy Efficiency Project 2023.
In this webinar, Stephen gives a summary and some strategies to manage the use of your irrigation systems to get the most out of your on-farm renewable energy assets.
A few points about getting started:
- Select the right auditor: Someone who knows how your farm systems work.
- The audit needs to consider the whole of system: it’s more than efficiency improvements for individual equipment
- Define the objective – efficient equipment or cost-effective systems.
Stephen outlines some examples of how systems can be optimised to operate within low-cost tariff times and then to operate within solar generation times.
Stephen outlines a number of strategies to utilise pumps during solar generation times to reduce energy costs and more fully utilise on-farm solar generation.
In one example, a farm reduced its annual irrigation energy cost from $80,000 to $1,000, by using a high proportion of solar power and reducing peak power use from 34% to around 4%.
He talks about how important data is and says that:
“people don’t realise how important data is until they have it”
He talks about the wider benefits of integrated irrigation system design beyond the electricity bill savings including flexibility, the ability to operate more irrigators at once and potentially increased productivity.
See the webinar video here:
QFF is delivering Type 2 and 3 energy audits at 35 large electricity users throughout Queensland as part of the The Queensland Business Energy Savers Transformation (QBEST) initiative. QFF is delivering the QBEST Program with funding from the Queensland Government.
There are over 100 energy efficiency case studies from recent on-farm energy audits on the Ag Energy Hub - An energy resource hub for Queensland farmers and landholders (qldagenergyhub.com.au)