How can a bakery use solar power to help reduce the cost of their electric ovens?

Troy Bryce, part of the Bakehouse Espresso Group, talks about their bakery business on the South Coast of New South Wales. The business has grown to employ around 60 people over the past few years, with their predominant energy use being the electric ovens which are costly to run on mains power. The business decided to install solar panels to reduce their energy costs and control their energy usage better. With the largest wattage of panel on their roof, the solar panels now provide around 25% of their power supply.

By using solar energy, the Bakehouse Espresso Group can monitor their energy use on-site and adjust their day's production accordingly. They are also exploring ways to use their excess energy, rather than exporting it. With more roof space available, the business can continue to increase their solar capacity in the future.

So my name is Troy Bryce, and we are part of the Bakehouse Espresso Group, and we have bakeries on the South Coast in New South Wales. We've just built a production plant here about six years ago, and it culminates in the main facility for our retail outlets. Our operations now are growing in the last four or five years to employing around about 60 people.

Our predominant energy use would be our oven. We're located in an area that doesn't have natural gas, so bottled gas is always a problem. So we are running on electric ovens, which gives us a nice even heat. But the cost relating to that is quite significant on that on the mains power. We feel that our overall footprint, if you like for energy use, we find that with using solar would allow us to present a bit of control back to us. And in doing that we can monitor what we use on our site and sometimes even vary our day's production to work in with that solar production.