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The vertical farming industry has experienced significant challenges during the recent energy crisis due to rapidly rising and highly fluctuating energy prices. This industry is more energy intensive than other forms of agriculture. Energy is one of the biggest costs and rising energy prices can seriously jeopardize the business model. Read here what steps you should take as a company in the vertical farming you can take it again to get a grip on energy consumption and can reduce costs.
Vegetable farming requires a lot of energy for lighting, heating, cooling and ventilation. Most of this energy demand is often supplied by a central installation. It is more difficult to trace the allocation of energy demand to processes.
As a result, many entrepreneurs have limited insight into energy management and no way to assign energy consumption to processes or spaces. This prevents them from identifying and implementing savings options.
As a result, vertical farmers lose energy cost control. Rising energy costs can only be taxed to a limited extent, which nullifies the business model in the event of high energy costs and leaves the entrepreneur vulnerable.
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To reduce vulnerability and make the revenue model more robust you need to move towards predictable and controllable energy costs.
Understanding the current situation is an essential first step in addressing the problem thoroughly. Then to compare the current situation with so-called benchmark values. This helps you find out where the opportunities lie. Once the problems are clear, you can get started and set goals.
We have drawn up a 4-step plan to help you get started. This allows you to regain control over your energy management and reduce costs.
To gain insight, the first step is to make a thorough inventory of the major consumers of energy. Based on (consumption) data, you can map the energy management. If this data is not available, an energy monitoring system is installed, which visualises energy consumption at high resolution down to machine level.
After identifying the largest energy consumers, energy flow diagrams can be created to provide insight into the complex energy management. Here you can even map the electricity consumption per room in detail.
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The next step is to compare your company's energy consumption with theoretical benchmarks to determine discover where energy is being wasted unnecessarily. Then you will rank all possible solutions based on their potential for energy and cost savings, taking into account the complexity and the investments required.
Based on the ranking, you identify low-hanging fruit and draw up an energy transition plan. Plans are being made how future adjustments and changes can be properly monitored. The concrete results can be quantified as quickly as possible. It also looks at which ranked savings solutions may require further research to identify greater savings.
Here we show a practical example where the step-by-step plan has been applied.
A leading vertical farmer was in an energy crisis. Energy consumption was significantly above the industry standard. QING has helped this client to reduce consumption and save costs.
QING has identified a savings potential of 3,000,000 kWh (worth €350,000 per year, based on September 2023 energy prices), which is equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of ~1150 households. The implementation proposals have been presented to achieve these savings. This represents an impressive 40% reduction in energy consumption!
Based on the ranking of possible solutions, detailed project proposals have been developed. This showed that an adjustment of the humidity in the greenhouses can result in significant savings. In addition, lights burned 30% of the time in rooms where there were no crops at the time, which is smart and easy to solve by using smart lighting.
Measurements and data showed that there were also opportunities to better regulate the internal climate at the location. Changes in temperature and ventilation in certain growth chambers would result in drastic savings.
In addition to improvements to the existing system, QING also looked at how the overall design of the energy system could be changed. It was investigated whether there were options to use the outside air for the cooling load, or using heat from various machines to control the temperature in the factory.
If they succeed in implementing the proposed improvements, they can continue to grow sustainably with a healthy energy infrastructure. The 40% reduction in energy consumption positions the company favourably to expand their production capacity for the future and strengthen their market position.
What are the benefits of gaining control over energy management at the moment?
When you get started with this, it's crucial not only to draw up a plan for WHAT you're going to do, but especially HOW you're going to implement it.
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