Serra farming was a multiple sites with multiple electricity bills. And the game was to reduce their electricity costs, to take them away from irrigation tariffs, and to potentially get them on to a tariffs where they could have a feed in tariff for electricity generated that wasn't used. So the goal of this particular site was it had packing sheds, which are commercial operations running Monday to Friday with a half day typically on Friday and closed at weekends.
Irrigation is when it's sunny they irrigate, when it's not sunny, they don't irrigate, which is actually a good solution for solar. So it was multiple sites here with multiple goals to reduce electricity, but in two different scenarios. So we have 40 kilowatts of solar on one avocado farm at Kairi, we have 40 kilowatts of solar at a farm in ending, and we have a hundred kilowatts of solar at Serra farming's main area banana farm. This one of course, because it's a hundred kilowatts is not feed-in. It had to be modelled to meet the profile of the electricity usage.
At this site most of the accounts were over a hundred thousand kilowatt hours, classified as large. One particular account was very large and has a 90 kilowatt pump on it with various dosing fertiliser pumps on it. So the consumption was large on majority of the sites, they will be adjusting some of their fertilising regimes to make and take advantage of the way that solar is generated. Currently it's set up for the irrigation tariffs so that it's off peak, cheaper if you irrigate at weekends. We're going to move things around so that it's daytime and that the staff don't get watered at the same time.
How was solar power able to reduce the irrigation costs of a banana and avocado farm in Queensland?
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