Wineries
As the climate conditions are usually very hot in the winelands, wineries have a very high demand for cooling. Not only in the storage facilities but also during early production it is crucial to have a stable, efficient and affordable supply of energy. Usually traditional compression chillers are used to cool a glycol/water mixture. This fluid cools double walled stainless steel tanks or feeds fan coils or cooling cassettes in order to cool the wine in the tanks or the whole storage facility.
This requires large amounts of electricity, which in South Africa is characterized as expensive and unreliable. Power outages and annual price hikes of 15-20% endanger product, production and long-term profitability.
Providing the required cooling performance with heat pumps not only saves up to 40% of electricity but also provides the chance to get to utmost independency from the national grid. As demand for electricity is reduced substantially, it becomes feasible to produce the required electricity via PV modules and to install a smaller power bank with batteries. This would enable wineries (which always have the space for the PV-modules) to reduce the grid to be the emergency back up system.
As a fringe benefit all hot water needs for DHW, production and cleaning purposes will be provided by the heat pump at zero additional cost.
Our “high power” HP heat pumps have no limitation in performance and are available in size 12-40 kW, 15-70 kW and 25-100 kW. A maximum of 6 engines can operate in cascade with only one supervising and control unit thus resulting in 600 kW performance. They can be flexibly combined in order to get the perfect dimensioning and to operate the heat pumps at the most effective design point. If one needs an even higher performance a second cascade could provide this.
Surplus heat – after usage in DHW and process water – can be dumped into ground water layers, into air, boreholes or via hybrid solutions.
Our e-source manager can manage up to 4 different sources and always uses the most efficient option. The most efficient source/dump combination is a hybrid installation consisting of groundwater usage and air unit. The air units are available in sizes of 40 kW, 70 kW, 100 kW or 150 kW. Working limitation of the air units in regards of outside temperatures are between +45/-15 °C. Only in the case of higher outside temperatures some “precooling” via groundwater closed loop and via an heat exchanger would be required, Groundwater would not be consumed as it only takes up the thermal energy and would be re-injected to the underground.
In newly to be erected wine cellars we recommend a combined system of heat pumps, air coolers and TABS (thermally activated building system) like the one which our partner for underfloor heating/cooling systems UPONOR has designed for Glenelly Estate in Stellenbosch.
Upgrades of existing installations with heat pumps usually have a pay back period of under 4-5 years and South African government subsidizes this with substantial tax benefits.