How did Bidfoods Melbourne overcome the commercial solar installation challenges to maximise ROI?
Synopsis
Bidfood, a national food distribution business based in Melbourne, has a 270 kilowatt solar system with 684 LG 400 watt panels and 9 Fronius inverters. This gives them a full suite of what the site's consumption and production is with the solar system. Bidfood is upgrading their plants for more energy-efficient refrigeration, which is the main part of their energy costs. By pairing it with solar systems, they can bring their energy cost down, which is one of their major business expenses.
The design for Bidfood's Truganina location used LG solar panels to meet structural engineer limitations, using less weight on the roof and less steel, which saves the business money on overall system costs. Over 25 years, Bidfood estimates the system will save them 2.2 million dollars based on a conservative measure of a 3% annual increase in electricity prices. Most customers are looking for energy bill cost savings and stability over the years.
Video Transcript
Today we're at Bidfood in Truganina which is in the western side of Melbourne.<br/>They're a cold storage facility they food distribution.<br/>They're a national based business that have got facilities like this all over the country.
It's 270 kilowatt site, there's 684 LG 400 watt panels and we've paired that with 9 Fronius inverters 3 phase, everything's tied in. It all hooks in for the monitoring portal which is online, which gives us a full suite of what the site consumption is live and also what the site production is with the solar system.
So you get a nice energy balance across the year.
For BidFoods particularly, with their solar system what we're trying to achieve was they're upgrading a lot of their plants for more energy efficient refrigeration which is obviously the main part of their energy costs.
So when they're doing that they're also pairing it in with solar systems.
We're doing multiple sites with BidFood at the moment and it really is about bringing their energy cost down which is one of their major costs to their business.
Part of the design here at BidFoods in Truganina was that we needed to fit in with what the structural engineer limitations were given to us.
We achieved that by using LG solar panels which means we used a lot less of them so you get a lot more wattage per square meter lets say, with less amount of panels therefore there's less weight on the roof.
If there's less weight on the roof what we're finding at the moment is when we look at new sites, new warehouses being built they're having to spend an exorbitant amount of money strengthening the steel work in the roof to cater for the weight of the solar panels.
So if you factor that into your cost your overall cost of your systems then really you're<br/>looking at a far less cost because you got less panels on the roof less weight on the roof, therefore less steel is gonna save you a lot of money on the overall cost of the system.
All that comes full circle and comes back around to the return of the investment of the whole project.
In the first year we've estimated that the bills are gonna reduce in excess of $100,000 and by the time we get to the 25 year mark with the LG panels with their low degradation we're gonna have about 2.2 million based on a average increase of electricity price of 3% a year.
We feel that's a fairly conservative measure 3% when you can see price fluctuations in your energy costs from you know can be up to 20% a year.
Most customers are looking for a cost saving on their energy bills.
Really cost saving and the stability of that cost as well over the years.