The ICaRE4Farms Solar feasibility tool can be accessed here
What is it?
This tool was built for the ICaRE4Farms project to help farmers and consultants assess whether a solar thermal installation is viable for any given scenario.
ICaRE4Farms Feasibility Tool
Calculating the heat demand of a farm
The heat demand of a farm is not a single, static number (i.e. 5 kWh/day). As with most things in life, the heat demand varies throughout the year and throughout the day. It also depends heavily on what you actually use your heat for.
- Do you use it to occasionally clean stables?
- To clean milking parlours twice a day?
- To produce milk for calves?
You name it, we got it! Well, to some degree. The tool has models to calculate the annual heat demand on an hourly basis for several different farming activities that were relevant for IC4F. For the user, it’s mostly just a matter of "answering the questions that pop up on the screen’’. For instance, when you select calf feeding as a farming activity, you will be asked to fill in the total number of calves your farm has and your total daily hot water demand.
If you do not know your total daily hot water demand, you can also allow the tool to calculate it for you. If you’d like to do this, we need some more information though. For example, on a calf-rearing farm, we need to know how much hot water you give to each calf per day, and the desired temperature of the hot water. Some more information such as the number of batches of calves and the length of the breeding cycle can also be specified. For most of our farming activities, we follow this basic structure. You can either manually fill in your total hot water demand, or fill in a bunch of details regarding how you run your farm to let the tool calculate it for you. Most tabs also have a switch that reveals some advanced options, but you don’t need to bother with these unless you specifically want to change any of those settings.
Step 1: Location
Pick your location and farming activity. From the pull-down menu, select the location of your farm. An average solar output has been applied to each region.
Next, select the type of farming activity required. There are 4 activities built into the tool
- Calf feeding requires a lot of water twice a day to make feed.
- Milk Pasteurization - for those that carry out on-site food processing.
- Cleaning - designed for dairy farms where hot water is needed to clean milking equipment and storage tanks etc
- Process heating - suitable for chicken and pig rearing farms
For this example, we are selecting a dairy farm in Ireland, that requires 900L of water at 80°C. The farm uses an electric boiler to heat water. The unit price (kW/h) in May 2022 was €0.2756. Although there is no government subsidy for installation, in this example, a 25% subsidy will be applied.
Step 2: Farming Practice
During this step, you will fill in the details for the activity you previously selected. In our example, this is cleaning. You can select any of the available activities, and you can even combine multiples of them. When you select an activity, a new tab will become available with some questions for you to fill in.
Step 3: Solar thermal Energy system
’This tab allows you to change options with regard to the solar thermal installation you would like. You don’t need to change anything in this tab, but you can specify a maximum surface area to be covered. This can be useful if you don’t have a lot of space and would prefer to have a smaller installation. In our example, this is not the case, so we won’t change anything in this tab.
The Fengtech system variables are built into the application, this will be the default setting. If you want to enter details of other types select the custom option. Enter the area that would be available to install a solar thermal plant.
Step 4: Economic Evaluation
In this section, you can fill in various data that are necessary to calculate the financial aspects of your business case. This includes things like your energy price, and whether or not you want to apply for a subsidy. In our example, we included a 25% subsidy over the investment so we will fill that in here.
Result
After all the parameters have been set, the application will give information on the farm heat demand, the number of Fengtech solar collectors needed, the area need for the collectors and how much energy the plant would generate and much more.
An estimate of how much the plant would cost is provided, and an estimate of the payback time is calculated.
In this example, the expected payback on the plant is 3.4 years with a 25% subsidy. By removing the subsidy the payback is 4.5 years. Modifying any of the settings at this stage will automatically update the results
