Farm and Packhouse

A 150kW-plus solar deployment supporting an agricultural operation with cold storage and packhouse facilities. The quantified savings analysis is being compiled. This page sets out the energy challenge the system addresses and how Soluno manages it.

Why agricultural energy is hard to manage

Cold storage runs a constant refrigeration baseload around the clock, every day of the year, because the cost of a cold-chain failure is measured in spoiled produce, not in kilowatt hours. On top of that steady draw, a packhouse adds sharp seasonal peaks: through harvest, the grading, washing, and packing lines run hard for weeks, then fall quiet. The result is an energy profile with both a high floor and large seasonal swings, exactly the kind of load where a set-and-forget system leaves money on the table.

Where active management earns its keep

South African time-of-use tariffs price energy several times higher in peak windows than off-peak, and the spread is widest in winter. For a cold store, that creates a clear opportunity: pull the temperature down and build thermal reserve during cheap off-peak periods, then ride through the expensive peak windows on stored cold and battery power rather than drawing from the grid. Soluno’s optimiser re-solves dispatch continuously rather than once at commissioning, shifting deferrable load and scheduling battery charge and discharge against the live tariff and the season.

Reliability matters as much as cost on a site like this. Soluno tracks the health of the solar, inverters, and battery continuously, surfacing faults and capacity degradation early, because on a cold-chain site an undetected fault is a spoilage risk, not only a performance one.

What comes next

The full month-by-month invoice analysis for this site, covering cold-chain energy costs, harvest-season demand management, and system reliability, is being compiled. Check back soon for the quantified results. If you run a similar operation, the free savings analysis is the place to start.