Utilizing Green Technology
Utilizing Green Technology. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.
You are starting to see green technology popping up all over the place. Office buildings, farms and ranches and perhaps even your local winery. Bill Sweat, co-owner of Winderlea Vineyard and Winery has invested a lot into green technology.
SWEAT: It’s part of an overall desire to be as sustainable as we possibly can so that’s reflected in our farming methods as well. This is a vineyard that has been around for 35 years. It’s always been what I would describe as softly farmed and we just wanted to take it a little further and so when we decided to put a building on the property it just felt right to try to do that in as soft a way as possible.
When they started the planning phase they went to a
SWEAT: So it is a very modern looking facility. Our property faces south so we had a very nice design with a shed roof so we’ve have a good southern exposure for solar. We have concrete floors so we have a large mass which collects thermal energy and then releases it back when it cools off. A lot of east and south facing windows and not very many on the west and on the north so the building itself is designed to try to collect heat when you want to collect heat and then keep heat away from the building during the hotter times of the year.
Interestingly Sweat says there is a lot to learn about the design.
SWEAT: There are windows all over the place that open both at the bottom and we have mechanical windows at the top of the building that open. This building is really the first one that I’ve ever owned where I felt like I’m learning to fine tune the building so that we can manage heating and cooling and try to minimize our use of energy right from the start.
A lot of the energy they do use is generated by solar panels and a solar hot water system. Keeping with the green theme they have installed power stations in the parking lot for use by electric vehicles to recharge. All those things combined have been very effective.
SWEAT: In the spring and early summer; April, May, June, our power bills were like $12, $29 and $35. Last winter we had power bills as high as $300 and so you can see it can make a pretty dramatic difference.
For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.
www.harvestcleanenergy.org
