Major Agricultural Company To Team With Tesla To Reduce Energy Costs
With all the hoopla surrounding the Model 3 launch, Tesla’s stock prices, and future vehicles such as the Tesla semi, it’s easy to forget that Tesla has a pretty wide reach in a variety of other industries as well. Projects like the solar roof and Powerwall can easily expand Tesla’s repertoire of technology into numerous other fields.
Take Limoneira, for example. Limoneira is a 124-year-old international agribusiness company based out of Santa Paula, California. The company owns over 11,000 acres of agricultural lands, various real estate properties, and water rights in California, Arizona, and Chile.
https://youtu.be/xS9_KPIsR_o
Currently, Limoneira has six solar installations totaling 4.2 million kWh generated annually. Today, it was announced that Limoneira will partner with Tesla in order to expand its solar installations and hopefully become completely energy independent by 2022.
The partnership with Tesla will add 1.5 MW of solar, which will translate to approximately an additional 2.8 million kWh of energy annually. This will be combined with an energy storage system (no details yet, but I assume like a giant Powerwall), which will allow Limoneira to achieve becoming 50% off the grid.
According to Mark Palamountain, Limoneira’s Senior Director:
“This project will study the efficacy of battery systems paired to solar manufacturing facilities. The goal is to reduce demand from the utilities during the day, which is the high cost period, and offset that use with less expensive night time energy that is stored in the battery.”
Imagine if more major installations used less power from the grid, say, during a scorching summer day. Maybe then I can actually get through a summer here in California with the grid being overloaded every few weeks!
SOURCE | Inside EVs
