Thermal battery installation by Glaciem Cooling Technologies - South Australia
Glaciem Cooling Technologies partnered with Pernod Ricard Winemakers (PRW) to complete a world-first example of sustainable winemaking with the installation of Glaciem’s Thermal Energy Storage (TES) battery.
Now fully operational at the company’s Rowland Flat site in the Barossa Valley, the system integrates super-efficient ammonia refrigeration with Glaciem’s award-winning Phase Change Material energy storage that captures and stores energy and releases it when needed.
The collaboration between Glaciem and Pernod Ricard Winemakers – producers of brands including Jacob’s Creek, St Hugo and Wyndham Estate in Australia – is a milestone, proving large-scale wineries can also leverage technology to become sustainable.
Managing demand on the power grid from renewable electricity sources, combined with the growing need to reduce carbon-based energy generation, often becomes a balancing act between generation and load. The Glaciem TES battery stores energy so it can be used as a reliable source when there is excess renewable power and can also be discharged when renewable energy is not available. In this way the TES is a core steppingstone in PRW’s plan to source 100% of the electricity for renewable energy sources.
Technical details:
Pernod Ricard’s Roland Flat facility is located in the Barossa Valley, SA, and has winemaking, wine storage and packaging capability. Significant refrigeration is used to process the harvest during summer months from January to April.
Refrigeration loads decrease by about 70% outside of this period. The existing refrigeration plant, Frig 9, operates year round, providing process cooling, barrel storage and air conditioning and has been identified as optimal for thermal storage integration.
This project involves the integration of a Glaciem thermal storage unit operating on renewable energy with the existing Frig 9 ammonia refrigeration plant to optimise process cooling techniques in a primary production context and reduce exposure to peak electricity costs.
The project involved:
installation of a new Thermcold DYN 900 unit to provide 2.6MWh of thermal energy storage
integration of the PCM TES with the site's existing ammonia refrigeration plant
integration of this system with virtual and on-site renewable assets
using 0 degrees PCM and Dynalene HC as the heat transfer fluid
integration of ACFA with the site’s Building Management System (BMS) to allow the system to dynamically control the usage and storage of the site’s renewable energy.
Watch a video tour of the installation: