Offsetting High Bills with Renewable Electricity

Part of the NCIA site induction was a tour of the factory and see the process of how NCIA makes their tiles. Our guide showed us numerous parts of the tile development process, including steps that consume extremely high amounts of energy that continues to drive the manufacturer's bill up significantly.

The concept was to install a large-capacity solar system to help offset consumption to help reduce daily operational expenses.

"Obviously prices have gone up. We've got a lot of roof space, as you probably see through the tour. So plenty of room to put it up. Two megawatts is what was what we could fit, and two megawatts is what we put on there."
Our guide said.

Energy Assessment: How NCIA Could Reduce Their Grid Consumption

Because of NCIA's extremely high electricity consumption, the company had already invested in a large-scale solar system of 1MW to help offset costs.

Since then, prices of electricity prices continued to increase, which became a burden on the production, so NCIA looked to invest in more solar energy generation.

"We went with the solar because energy prices got really expensive. We had a one megawatt system that was covering, I think about, 8 to 10%, depending on how sunny the year was and the age of the panels."

In addition to installing their extended solar system, there were a few additional requirements upon installation.

Various Installation Requirements: A Safety-First Outlook

At the commencement of the project we identified that rooftop access could be significantly improved with the installation of a permanent ladder system.

This improved the overall safety during the construction phase of the project but also for the client’s future maintenance of the asset.

Elite designed, fabricated, and installed the ladder system for the client without any variation to project cost, which demonstrated our commitment to safety for the complete lifecycle of the asset.

2MW of Solar: Delivering the Required System

The 2MW solar system installation consisted of 3,919 x Trina 510W Vertex Solar Panels, as well as 16 Integrated Sungrow SG110CX and SG50CX Inverters.

Delivery of the project included: lengthy but successful consultation with Ausgrid for connection approvals, board design, PV array design, engineering assessment, inverter mounting structure fabrication, installation of more than 50km of DC cable work, and coordinated power shutdown with the client.

The site operates 24/7 and can only facilitate an outage once a year during over the Christmas holiday period. This made delivering on agreed milestones critical to the success of the project.