One of the main reasons is financial benefit. When they did their cost analysis and a case study, and had reviewed some of the case studies, that we've already done with other customers, they could see that if they invest X amount, they'd have it paid back typically within about four to five years. And that's the system that they've chosen is off high calibre. They're confident that they're going to get 20 plus years service life out of it. So this site can take on average, about 600 kilowatts a day of power. So we put a system in that we think is going to at least take away two thirds, to up to 75%, depending on the time of year and the weather, of their energy bills. Here is bananas, but we also have gotten quite a number of acres under management in regards to avocados.
The potential energy saving between their three sites that we're looking at is between $90,000 to $115,000 a year. And that depends on the current tariffs and the weather, and how much they utilise their self consumption. But they were very happy with that, and when they run their figures on it, they went for it. I think because of the higher cost of the embedded ground mount system, I think the average, including the rooftop solar which has a payback of a roundabout 4.4 years, and the ground mounts have an average of about six and a half years. I would say there'd be a mean average of about 5.2, five years across the three sites with 300 kilowatts. But they have a couple of smaller embedded pumps, and of those for irrigating, one is a 37 kilowatt pump, the other one's say 45 kilowatt pump, and a 55 kilowatt pump. But because they're also VSD variable speed drive the actual drawing would be only about 30 to 35 kilowatts, but it's not every day they need to irrigate.
So they wanted to feed-in as well, so that site has got feed-in. So we put 30 kilowatts of inverter with 40 kilowatt of panels on ground mounts for those two sites. Just talking about feed-in, we managed to create or redistribute another electricity account on the main packing shed. And we redistributed the power across the packing shed there. And so they're getting a feed in tariff of two 30 kilowatt inverters and 40 kilowatt of panels, and an extra 80 kilowatts. So even when they're not in production they're getting a feed-in as we speak up in the main farm. And that was something that they were very keen for.
What was the financial return for the 300kW solar power system at Serra Farming?
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