Activities

The TESLA project has gathered the practices available among European wineries to evaluate the energy situation and to adopt measures to improve it, addressing building techniques, cooling and refrigeration technologies, thermal consumption, electrical devices and lighting as well as techniques for operations management. (see additional information field)

Additional information

From the quantitative point of view, cooling processes consume most energy in wineries. These processes can represent nearly 50% of the total energy consumed. Thus, improving the technologies involved is the key factor to improve energy efficiency, for example by:



- using cooling machines with an energy efficiency ratio close to 3 or higher;



- using cooling storage systems, or in some processes, specific heat exchangers;



- especially in new facilities, installing geothermal energy in connection with heat pumps or cooling machines.



These measures must be carefully selected taking into account the seasonality of the sector, which can cause problems for the payback of large scale investments. Also, the number of hours of functioning per year of each type of equipment is an important factor for the feasibility of a substitution of technologies. The project's best practices manuals show that there are excellent possibilities to substitute technologies for more energy-efficient alternatives. The design of new facilities offers interesting opportunities, such as the use of geothermal energy.



The best practices manuals are available in several languages at the project website.http://www.teslaproject.org/