Woodchips replace coal to fuel tomato growing
Coal-fired boilers used to provide the energy to heat 12 hectares of greenhouses at a Nelson produce company.
Now the JS Ewers site in Appleby, which grows tomatoes, capsicums and eggplants, is heated by a state-of-the-art biomass boiler plant fuelled by woodchips sourced from local forestry slash.
The switch to green energy, made by the company over the past seven years, has seen a 98% reduction in on-farm carbon dioxide emissions, a drop of 27,000 tonnes of emissions annually.
The Government’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA), provided $4 million for the biomass energy plant, just over a third of its cost, from a now discontinued fund to help businesses decarbonise.
The 1400m² boiler shed is an impressive engineering feat in itself. Its 12.5-metre height allows trucks to deliver the woodchips inside the facility where they are fed through conveyors into the boiler room, a complex array of burners, pipes, and heat transfer stations.
The state-of-the-art technology and equipment comes from Austrian company Polytechnik.
JS Ewers general manager Pierre Gargiulo said the cost of coal, the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and consumer pressure were among factors that drove the switch to renewable energy.
“Everyone wants to do the right thing, and this is the right thing and it sets the business up for the future,” he said.
Gargiulo said the EECA funding made the project feasible.
The project also had to overcome the logisitical challenges caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly the disruption to shipping when the company needed to bring in 500 tonnes of materials from different ports.
Peter Hendry, the chief executive of grower co-operative MG Group, which owns JS Ewers, said the plant was the largest investment in sustainability in the group’s 100-year history.
Nelson MP Rachel Boyack, who attended the opening, praised the company’s vision, which put it “well ahead of the curve on emissions reductions”.
“Consumer preferences are changing and people will be asking these questions of other companies,” she said.
Not only did the plant reduce emissions, but it reduced potentially damaging forestry slash from local forests, she said.
Boyack said the only disappointing aspect was the coalition Government’s discontinuation of the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry (Gidi) fund that helped pay for the plant.
The fund had reinvested money paid by businesses under the ETS into decarbonisation projects.
Boyack called on the Government to come up with a replacement scheme to incentivise businesses to switch to renewable energy. “The reality is, if we are not coming up with these schemes, we are going to have to pay if we are not meeting emissions reduction targets.”