Recently, we electrified our largest off-grid farm system for our long-time client, Agright. Find out how the project is revolutionising poultry farming and agrivoltaics in this interview, which Smart Managing Director Huon Hoogesteger gave to ABC Radio Riverina's Morning Show on 23 July, 2024.

This interview can be heard in full on the ABC Radio Riverina website.

Sally O'Brien, ABC:

Now let's get some more detail about a story you could have heard in local news this morning about this off-grid chicken farm, which has been built to run independent of the power grid near Griffith. The Agright poultry farm uses nearly 4 MW of farm-generated solar power to supply electricity to 40 large chicken barns and six staff houses. But they do have diesel generators for backup. Huon Hoogesteger, who is the managing director of Smart Commercial Solar, the company which designed and managed the project, is speaking here with our reporter, Monty Jacka.

Huon Hoogesteger, Smart Commercial Solar:

Around 2021, we were approached by one of our historical clients, Daniel Bryan, who had started a chicken farming company called Agright. We started to discuss how to build a chicken farm off-grid in remote areas to make use of lower-cost land and to be able to build chicken farms faster. So, we processed a whole lot of data and designed and modelled a solar system that would allow him to build that off-grid chicken farm. On the 30th of June in 2023, we signed an agreement. Over the next nine months, we built the 4 MW of solar, 4.4 MWh of battery, connecting 40 sheds of chicken growing, six homes, water pumping, water filtration, and freezers so that he could realise this dream of having the lowest carbon cost chicken in the world.

Monty Jacka, ABC:

Tell me a little bit about how the power generation works. How many panels are we talking, and are they spread out throughout the property, or is there a designated farm just next door?

Huon:

We have the 4 MW of solar panels, which are a particular type of panel called bifacial panels. They can absorb sunlight from behind. They are mounted on solar trackers over the space of about four hectares of land. These trackers follow the sun throughout the day and produce high yields of solar energy. Even the reflected sunlight off the ground is absorbed by the bifacial panel on the backside as well. That solar is fed into the loads that are running at the time and charges the battery. The batteries are pretty much full by 10 o'clock in the morning. The batteries provide power to the site overnight or whenever there's no sunlight, allowing this site to run off-grid all the time. So far, we haven't had to pull on the generators for real power.

Monty:

For people who maybe aren't as familiar with how poultry farms work, do they consume a particularly large amount of power? What's all the energy going towards?

Huon:

Chicken farming is considered intense farming. There could be 40 to 50,000 chickens per shed. We have 40 sheds planned for this site. At the moment, only 16 have been built and are running with chickens. They consume quite a lot of energy, most of which is for cooling fans and air circulation.

Monty:

What was the cost to get this whole setup established?

Huon:

I can't disclose that information, but I can say that the cost of putting in the solar system was cheaper than paying for the upgrade to connect to the main power line and to continue paying an energy bill. Because it's so remote, it would have cost them a few million dollars to get the 14 to 19 kilometres of power line to the farm. It would have taken a couple of years. We were able to build this system in seven months and have them growing chickens a lot quicker. In terms of financials, it's at worst cash neutral but ideally cashflow positive.

Monty:

Agriculture produces a significant chunk of the greenhouse gas emissions here in Australia. Is this something you're expecting other farms to want to get towards in the next few years as focus turns towards that?

Huon:

Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of pressure on intense farming to decarbonise. Chicken is already the lowest carbon footprint of any protein, but that doesn't negate the need to further decarbonise. This is the first time we've done something this innovative. It's 100% off-grid, renewable power with a target of being 85% solar and battery powered. This is a benchmark in time for how far renewable energy has come. It allows the industry to expand intense farming into remote areas where there's currently no grid or a very weak grid. We can show that it can be done.

There have been hurdles with this project because we are on the edge of emerging technology. While battery technology has rapidly increased, we've had substantial technical challenges. We had no financial assistance, so it had to stack up on its own merits. Despite that, the trend of battery technology becoming more affordable and our increasing skills in integrating that technology make it financially viable for farming to consider going completely off-grid.

Interested? Read more about this innovative off-grid farm project in our Agright Meriki Case Study.