Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

SEMICON West '08: The Days of Wine and Solar
August 31, 2008

 

I’m on a train from Madrid to Valencia, Spain, where I will attend the European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition this week. As I look out over the rolling hills, I’m reminded of another solar event on the beautiful land surrounding San Francisco. As a pleasant final cap to a grueling SEMICON West/Intersolar North America week in mid-July, I joined Advanced Energy (Fort Collins, Colo.) for a tour of Cline Cellars, a winery in Sonoma, Calif.

 

We got the standard Cline Cellars tour, complete with the history of what was once a mission site, as well as fascinating tidbits about how wine is made. But our tour stopped perhaps longer than most do when they reach the site of the winery’s solar power inverter. And our tour also included a climb to the roof of the storage building to get a look at a couple thousand solar panels.

 

Cline Cellars has 1,974 Sharp 208 W solar panels (34,625 square feet of them) installed on the roof of its warehouse and fermentation buildings. The system, designed and built by SolarCraft (Novato, Calif.), provides all the electricity the winery needs — selling excess power generated during sunlight hours back to the local utility company for credit used during nights and winters.

 

Solar panels extend to the edge of the roof of Cline Cellars’ fermentation building. Peeking up next to the building are the tops of wine distillation tanks.

 

Of course, Advanced Energy didn’t bring us there to show off Sharp’s high-capacity solar panels. Those panels, after all, generate DC power — not very useful for hooking up with the power grid. So what Advanced Energy brings to the party is a big white box (well, it’s relatively small, actually) that sits at the side of the building. This inverter turns 411 kW peak DC power into ~351 kW AC for electricity use.

 

At SEMICON West, I had had a meeting with Todd Miklos, vice president of marketing for Advanced Energy, who explained to me the virtues of his company’s Solaron PV inverter — its higher efficiency (97% vs. 94-95% for competitors), smaller footprint, and transformerless design, to name a few. Those couple of percentage points difference in efficiency, he explained to the numbskull in front of him (that would be me), translate into significant cost savings. And, as he put it, Advanced Energy’s inverter provides ~5× as much power in the same footprint as other inverters.

 

But, as they say, seeing is believing. Also, somehow, hearing the same things out of the customer’s mouth gave them all a bit more weight. For the winery tour, SolarCraft’s Chris Bunas joined us, telling us about the differences between the inverters his company had originally designed into the solar power system and what we were seeing there. Advanced Energy’s one relatively small inverter stands in about a fifth of the space that the previous set of inverters stood, and outputs more AC power from the solar panels’ DC energy. In fact, Bunas seemed like he just couldn’t say enough good things about the new inverter in terms of the power they were able to get from it. And the Clines were undoubtedly pleased with how much less space that inverter was taking up.

 

Seen in the right of the frame is Advanced Energy’s Solaron PV inverter. The previous set of inverters filled an arc that came out further from the building and filled the area from the current inverter over to the structures at the left of the frame.

 

For SolarCraft’s part, they want to be able to create a system that gets the Clines enough power to serve all of their electricity needs, without costing them a fortune. As it is, the solar power system at Cline Cellars will be cash positive in 5-6 years.

 

But for Cline Cellars, probably the less obvious the solar system is, the better. For them, solar power is just a small part of their efforts to run a more sustainable business. Using solar energy is a good fit for a winery that has been farming naturally and sustainably for the past eight years. They avoid reliance on chemical pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers that are commonly used elsewhere, and instead use organic cover crops, compost teas, crushed volcanic rock and oyster shell, and natural mined sulfur. They don’t prune their vines or kill the growth on the ground, but instead bring in sheep and goats to graze when the season is done to clean everything up (and help feed their neighbor’s animals to boot).

 

The chardonnay vines at Cline Cellars look more scraggly than you’ll see at most wineries. As part of their sustainable farming efforts, the vineyard does not prune them back or kill the undergrowth, but instead relies on grazing sheep and goats to get the job done after the growing season.

 

Todd Miklos of Advanced Energy enjoys a taste of zinfandel after a tour of the winery and solar power installation at Cline Cellars.

For Cline Cellars, it is probably not their use of solar power that they want their visitors to remember, but the taste of their wines, which were, by the way, quite good. At this stage in the photovoltaic industry, so much of the timing of business revolves around available government incentives or the possible suspension of such benefits. But as cost reaches parity with traditional fossil fuels, solar energy is likely to become as invisible for the masses as it is now for the Clines. Advanced Energy’s inverter helps to bring the technology that much closer to grid parity.

 

Cheers to that.

 

 

 

 

Posted by Aaron Hand on August 31, 2008 | Comments (0)