Jaques farm, which is in Atherton Tablelands in Mareeba, its been there for over 30 years. They grow in excess, of I think they got about 200 acres of land there of which they grow about at this stage about 160 tonnes. Where they grow and distribute and roast their own beans in-house and distribute Australia wide, and they even export. Australia, unfortunately imports around 8 to 9,000 tonnes of coffee bean, but they're trying to supply their own unique bean for Australia. And it's so far been doing very well. They're very successful in what they do. The existing system they had in there was... Yes, poor quality due to time, more than anything, it was about six, six and a half years old. Those panels were unfortunately quite inferior compared to what's in the marketplace today. The panels did let it down though, surfing watering ingress on top of all that creating dead shorts.
Fortunately the customer was on the old feed-in tariff for 44 cents and he wanted to keep that. And he's still got another 10 years to run, which finishes in 2028. So he wanted to maximise that, and he did a lot of research before approaching us. And hence we quoted with a high end panel, 85kW across four electricity accounts, to supply them with 44 cents. So we're right in the midst of installing that on existing carport roofs, and then we've got another 80kW to cover their cafe and also a pump house. So early indications of the performance is substantially more than the previous system in order of about 25 to 28% already. All of them are encompassed with DC optimisation technology, and you've got panel level monitoring. And with the cafe, specially there is some stacks with roasting and so forth, that could cause a bit of shading issues. So the DC optimisation is the best option for them.
The irrigation is a big part, So what they've done is they split irrigation timing. The arrays with the 44 cents is irrigating at night. It doesn't cost them 44 cents, cost significant less because they're on the mixed tariff, which only about 12, 14 cents. So that's working really, really well. The other part with regards to the cafe and the pump house that's going to irrigate during the day, during the solar times, and obviously with the cafe it's opening hours are 10am to 4pm, which is close to perfection, for the solar to backend it.
How was a replacement solar power system optimised for Jaques Coffee Plantation?
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