Energy Audits on Irish Dairy Farms

Peterx

Hello,
I have ran this past the moderators and thanks to them for permission.

I would like to carry out energy audits on Irish Dairy farms for my final year project in a DIT course in Energy Management. For this I need to go to dairy farms and I am looking for volunteers. The information used in the report will be anonymous.
My father-in-law has a dairy farm in Laois with vexatious electricity bills which sparked the idea and I will do another audit on a friends Uncle's farm in Tullamore. I have a couple of other feelers out but am looking for more farms, the more the merrier up to a certain point!
If any of ye think you might be interested and wish to remain completely anonymous please reply via PM. Any questions whatsoever please reply to the thread. All information gathered will be used in confidence and the report will be anonymous.

The plan is to;

• Visit the farm
• Note the main energy users (water pumps, vacuum pumps, refrigeration compressors, fluorescent lighting, tractors and so on)
• Record the energy inputs to the farm (electricity, gas, diesel, petrol)
• Gather information on energy usage patterns
• Analyse the utility bills
• Put a report together.

The farmers get;

• an energy audit of his/her operation
• an analysis of their energy usage
• a report with suggested methods of reducing their energy bill

I get;

• Useful feedback from this thread
• A final year project
• A happier Father in Law!

The Farming and Forestry forum gets;
• Anonymous information on a sample of Irish Dairy Farm energy usage patterns
• Feedback on this thread

I am sure this could be done better so any suggestions or improvements please do reply in thread too!

John Upton of Teagasc has already done an excellent report on this as it happens but I'll go again. Hopefully adding more information from different farms to his report.
John Upton's report - http://www.teagasc.ie/publications/2012/1641/John_Upton_EnergyEfficiencyonDairyFarms.pdf

Thanks,
Peter O'Farrell

Deepsouthwest

Peterx wrote: »

Hello,
I have ran this past the moderators and thanks to them for permission.

I would like to carry out energy audits on Irish Dairy farms for my final year project in a DIT course in Energy Management. For this I need to go to dairy farms and I am looking for volunteers. The information used in the report will be anonymous.
My father-in-law has a dairy farm in Laois with vexatious electricity bills which sparked the idea and I will do another audit on a friends Uncle's farm in Tullamore. I have a couple of other feelers out but am looking for more farms, the more the merrier up to a certain point!
If any of ye think you might be interested and wish to remain completely anonymous please reply via PM. Any questions whatsoever please reply to the thread. All information gathered will be used in confidence and the report will be anonymous.

The plan is to;

• Visit the farm
• Note the main energy users (water pumps, vacuum pumps, refrigeration compressors, fluorescent lighting, tractors and so on)
• Record the energy inputs to the farm (electricity, gas, diesel, petrol)
• Gather information on energy usage patterns
• Analyse the utility bills
• Put a report together.

The farmers get;

• an energy audit of his/her operation
• an analysis of their energy usage
• a report with suggested methods of reducing their energy bill

I get;

• Useful feedback from this thread
• A final year project
• A happier Father in Law!

The Farming and Forestry forum gets;
• Anonymous information on a sample of Irish Dairy Farm energy usage patterns
• Feedback on this thread

I am sure this could be done better so any suggestions or improvements please do reply in thread too!

John Upton of Teagasc has already done an excellent report on this as it happens but I'll go again. Hopefully adding more information from different farms to his report.
John Upton's report - http://www.teagasc.ie/publications/2012/1641/John_Upton_EnergyEfficiencyonDairyFarms.pdf

Thanks,
Peter O'Farrell

I'm part of an energy efficiency group measuring all farm inputs with Carbery milk products in West Cork. I wonder if they would share their info with u, they started monitoring 12 of us around 3 or 4 yrs ago, but doing 18, so that should give a good wide spread. John Upton was also heavily involved with us before he went to the US.

Peterx

Deepsouthwest wrote: »

I'm part of an energy efficiency group measuring all farm inputs with Carbery milk products in West Cork. I wonder if they would share their info with u, they started monitoring 12 of us around 3 or 4 yrs ago, but doing 18, so that should give a good wide spread. John Upton was also heavily involved with us before he went to the US.

Thanks Deepsouthwest,

I will pm you there for more info and apologies for not seeing your reply until now.


Thanks to the farmers who got in touch and apologies to those I didn't get to visit. Logistics finally kicked in and the weekends ran out.

I have been on several farms now at this stage and to be honest I have learned a lot on every farm I visited, the obvious energy and enthusiasm for farming I encountered everywhere was really refreshing to see.

I've two more farms to visit and then the number crunching will begin in earnest with a report back up here hopefully in early May.
In the meantime enjoy the last day of quota!

regards,
Peter

Peterx

Thanks again to the farmers who helped out in my college thesis.
I can send on the file to anyone who is interested.

I carried out audits on 9 farms, one farm was visited twice as it changed parlour and added a plate cooler in April.

My aim was to work out the total energy usage and translate it to a kilowatt value.
Then I could divide it by the amount of litres produced to give a kW/litre value.
This could be used to assess energy usage across farms and see which type of farm was most energy efficient.

In fairness I did not achieve this aim. As mentioned in my opening post John Upton did a much more comprehensive job.

The results were incomplete in that;
Many farms have multiple power supplies and I had one single meter.
I did not manage to ascertain the total fuel oil usage (many farmers use contractors for field work)
I did not manage to fully ascertain the milk production.

In terms of extrapolating my results to the "average" Irish dairy farmer my results had too wide a range and therefore would not be said to be average.

Generally (in so far as a sample of 9 can be generalised) the farms were well run with either direct expansion or icebank cooling in operation backed up with plate coolers. I was interested to see if DX was actually cheaper than the icebank once the cost of dayrate electricity was included.
If you can do the bulk of your cooling on the night rate the less energy efficient bulk ice maker can be cheaper to run than the DX.


One area of potential further research is in the field of power factor. Commercial industry is penalised if their power factor is less than 0.95 (scale is between 0 and 1) as this results in a loss of useful power.
Farmers do not in general get penalised for low power factor and therefore some of the farms are operating with power factor values in and around 0.8.

There may be potential for further research into the possibility of improving the power factor with the use of capacitor banks. In the case of rural farms remote from a strong grid supply where upgrading the supply may be very expensive this retro-fit of a capacitor bank to improve power factor may help increase the available power in the existing lines.