ENERGY
Energyfl ows in mushroom growing
Last year, Delphy Mushrooms ran a project called “Energy Flows”. On five Dutch mushroom farms the energy flows of the climate unit were visualised. Calculations breaking down the total amount of primary energy used by the climate control unit revealed the three main consumers of energy: cook out, cooling and heating.
By Jan Gielen, DLV Plant Mushrooms, Manager / Climate & Energy Specialist
J.Gielen@
delphy.nl
T
here are a variety of options available to generate sustainable energy and reduce energy consumption in the mushroom growing sector. A clear distinction should be made between generating sustainable energy and energy saving. If energy from renewable sources is generated on the farm, the actual energy consumption remains identical. However, since the farm generates its own energy, less energy needs to be purchased from the main grid, which also contributes towards reducing the CO2
emission footprint.
With energy saving, the energy efficient equipment that is often used contributes towards actually reducing the amount of energy used, resulting in lower energy consumption and lower CO2
emissions. The ideal situation is one where energy efficient equipment is used to save energy, and sustainable energy is generated to supply part of the farm’s own energy need. Calculating the investment required to be able to generate energy from renewable sources can be done based on the total, annual energy con-
Measuring energy fl ows To visualise the energy flows and hence ways of saving energy, the energy consumption of a growing room was monitored under practical conditions on five farms for a period of nine months. The spectrum covered was one farm with mechanical harvesting, three manual picking farms with mainly white mushrooms, and one manual picking farm with a central duct growing chestnut mushrooms, i.e. five growing rooms in total. The energy consumption was
sumption. Calculating the investment in energy saving equipment is clearly more complex, as the savings and ROI have to be calculated over part of the climate control installation. One of the obstacles here is the lack of data on how energy flows on a mushroom farm break down. To establish the savings that can be made on total energy consumption, it is important to know not only how much energy is saved by the equipment concerned, but also how energy consumption breaks down into components.
Energy fl ows in kWh-e, kWh-th and litres per cropping cycle/100 m2 Average farm 1 per cropping cycle/100 m2 Average farm 2 per cropping cycle/100 m2 Average farm 3 per cropping cycle/100 m2 Average farm 4* per cropping cycle/100 m2 Average farm 5 per cropping cycle/100 m2 Average all farms per cropping cycle/100 m2
Table 1 14 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
27,1 122,0 35,5 100,2 33,0
43,6 101,0 33,8
161,0 34,6 115,8
12,4 1431,3 1210,3 94,7
24,4
36,2 1352,2 862,9 1258,5 73,1 1260,2 1006,9 1366,4 90,3 567,0 528,3 1340,4 47,6 1942,0 1032,3 2248,5 51,9 1310,6 928,2 1247,6
9,1 0,0 0,0 0,0 0,0 1,8
Cropping cycle in days
Fan kWh-e
Lighting kWh-e
Cooling kWh-th
Heating kWh-th
Cook out litres
Steam humidifi cation litres
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