Geothermal

Hello,

First of all thank you very much who joined to our virtual tasting and interview last Wednesday. And also who e-mailed me and provided feedback. You can watch a recorded copy here.
 
Today I am going to write about the second aspect of our Net Zero Energy goal- the Geothermal Heating&Cooling. The below video explains how a geothermal heating&cooling system works.

As being a mechanical engineer for 35+ years, I had a lot of experience about these engineering marvels that have shaped the last century. You may heard as in the forms of Heat Pumps. The only difference is they use the soil as their heat sink instead of ambient air in classic A/C units. As Canada's weather is especially cold in winter months, it is much more suitable and efficient in our climate.

On our road we have natural gas line so we could connect and start burning gas right away. But we never planned burning fossil fuels even it was offered us free of charge. We were always planning to use a renewable heat source. As wineries are land rich, we have lots of available land to lay down outside loops. We installed our first phase in 2015 to heat&cool our tasting room.

In our 2017 expansion, we installed our second geothermal system. This new system has a very unique feature; as opposed to condition the inside air, this one was heating and/or cooling a water/glycol solution. This allowed us to use the system for both area heating&cooling inside the concrete floor as well as with the use of valves in wine processing. During harvest months we use this system to cool or warm our fermentation tanks. This was a revolutionary use of this system at a winery. Over the years we have been so happy with the performance, we are putting a third 20 ton system in the summer of 2023. 

These systems use only electric energy to run and as our electricity will be generated from the sun by this summer, the operational cost will be zero.

Stay well.
Adnan Icel
Owner&Winemaker