<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/why-solar-didnt-work-for-this-dairy-farmer-until-he-added-a-battery-and-put-it-on-wheels/>
"For years, dairy farmer Peter Mulheron had a steady procession of solar
salespeople turning up at his farm in Swan Marsh in south-west Victoria.
It wasn’t that he was opposed to renewable energy. Mulheron, a
fourth-generation dairy farmer who runs around 240 cows with his wife Trish and
son James, wanted to cut his exposure to rising electricity prices and an
unreliable rural grid.
The problem was that conventional rooftop solar didn’t really fit the way his
farm used electricity.
“We use a lot of power in the dark, so early morning and late evening, so solar
panels just never added up for us,” Mulheron told the Renewables in Agriculture
conference that is being held in Orange, NSW, this week.
At one point, he signed up for a solar system, before an electrician friend sat
him down at the kitchen table and convinced him that what he had been sold did
not match the farm’s actual energy use.
It was an important lesson, which eventually helped shape the solar system that
was installed on Mulheron’s farm in March this year: 105kW of solar combined
with 241kWh of battery storage, packed into a portable system that can be
folded into shipping containers and taken somewhere else.
But it was the battery that changed things for Mulheron: “For us, the game
changer on a dairy farm is batteries, or you’re wasting your time.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
