When Stone Edge Farm Estate Vineyards & Winery looked to build out a new property in the Mayacamas Mountains straddling Napa and Sonoma counties, the owners found themselves in a multimillion-dollar quandary.
The secluded spot made it an excellent site for a vineyard, but it would cost Pacific Gas & Electric a lot of money to run the 480-volt 3-phase power lines to the property to run the necessary winery equipment. In order to make it work, Mac and Leslie McQuown had to find a more economical way.
Stone Edge isn’t the typical farm. It’s a 16-acre property that uses 10 different kinds of inverters, a fuel-cell “hive,” and seven battery systems, with another on the way. The property was recently in the news for its microgrid system that held up during the devastating fires in Northern California. In January, the microgrid project won a Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award from the state of California.
The plan to bring power to Stone Edge’s remote vineyard has become another test case for off-grid technology: the Silver Cloud microgrid project. This time, unlike at the original Stone Edge site, there will be no grid backup.
“In the case of Silver Cloud, if the design is not robust enough, we have no failsafe,” said Craig Wooster, general contractor and project manager for the Stone Edge Microgrid Project and CEO of Wooster Energy Engineering. “We’ve got to be able to stand alone.”
Wooster took lessons from the “living laboratory” that is the Stone Edge farm and built out a design for the Silver Cloud microgrid that also incorporates learnings from the fires.
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