So my name is Troy Bryce, and we are part of the Bakehouse Espresso Group, and we have bakeries on the South Coast in New South Wales. We've just built a production plant here about six years ago, and it culminates in the main facility for our retail outlets. Our operations now are growing in the last four or five years to employing around about 60 people.
Our predominant energy use would be our oven. We're located in an area that doesn't have natural gas, so bottled gas is always a problem. So we are running on electric ovens, which gives us a nice even heat. But the cost relating to that is quite significant on that on the mains power. We feel that our overall footprint, if you like for energy use, we find that with using solar would allow us to present a bit of control back to us. And in doing that we can monitor what we use on our site and sometimes even vary our day's production to work in with that solar production.
We went with the largest panel, or the largest wattage of panel, again for roof size and capacity and to be at the front of the curve for solar at this point in time. We've gone with a maximum that we were allowed for the local energy supplier, but that can still grow into the future. We still have more roof space, but predominantly at the moment we've got ourselves to a situation where the solar is producing approximately 25% of our power supply. And on weekends and some other times we do have some export, but we're looking at other avenues to mitigate that export and use it onsite.
How can a bakery use solar power to help reduce the cost of their electric ovens?
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