It’s not only the bottles that are green at Andrew Peace Wines; an innovative 21st century approach to power generation is delivering environmental and financial benefits too.
Family-owned Andrew Peace Wines is one of the top 20 wine exporters in Australia, sending four million cases overseas annually. The Swan Hill, Victoria, winery has taken extraordinary steps to reduce its carbon footprint, secure its power supply, and install the capacity to feed energy back into the grid.
Renewable Baseload Generators (RBG), having previously converted the winery’s original backup generator to run on straight biodiesel, has recently installed six new Staunch generators powered by Scania to run its water treatment facility and provide prime power to the winery.
Combining 1.6MW of solar with the biodiesel-powered Staunch/Scania generators, Andrew Peace Wines is moving away from fossil fuelled power and its grid-supplied electricity, and aims to use waste streams as well as harvesting its own energy crops as feed stocks for onsite biodiesel production, thus closing the loop and further reducing its environmental impact.
The distributed energy resources not only provide long-term energy reliability for the AP Wines operations, they will also play a key role in providing support to the network in times of extreme stress.
Delivering the green solutions to AP Wines is a coalition of suppliers, comprising Danny Williams from RBG, Wally Younan from Staunch Machinery, Richard Martin from AEES Group, Les Cutajar from ComAp, and Kedem Levy from Enel X.
RBG has teamed up with Scania Australia to supply fuel-optimised biodiesel-compatible engines, and with Staunch Machinery, builders of quality generator enclosures designed in the Middle East, to produce generators perfect for the Australian climate and operating environment.
Danny Williams said the RBG biodiesel generators reduce emissions, smooth out fluctuation in solar power generation, provide security of energy supply as well as providing capacity to feed back into the grid.
All RBG generators are super silent and feature ComAp control systems, making them flexible and suited to a number of on-and off-grid functions, including grid export. They also integrate with the site’s ComAp Hybrid Management control system.
Enel X is a global market leader in demand response and power flexibility. With Enel X’s help, AP Wines is turning its backup generators into a flexibility asset that will support the grid, earn new revenue and put downward pressure on wholesale electricity pricing.
Richard Martin, Managing Director of AEES Group, energy supply management experts, said that AP Wines’ move towards innovative energy sources helps deliver better management of the seasonal impost of the network poles and wires demand costs. Combining these initiatives can save the business up to 50 per cent of its grid-derived energy costs.
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