Eco Innovator: Peter Yealands
Home » Blog » Sarah Heeringa » Eco Innovator: Peter YealandsPeter Yealands has a passion for wine that is matched only by his enthusiasm for sustainability, including GPS-controlled tractors (more efficient than driver-controlled) and guinea pigs for keeping the grass down (er, less efficient than sheep, it turns out) ...
Peter Yealands pioneered mussel farming in New Zealand and has for the last decade ploughed his considerable energy and entrepreneurial flair into Yealands Wine Estate in Marlborough. He spoke to Good editor Sarah Heeringa about his latest ideas.
Good: You seem to be interested in everything, not just wine.
Yealands: I’m a jack of all trades and a master of one! But I’m throwing all my energies into the wine business, for sure. Which doesn’t mean that I can’t help others in the business try different things. Our winery is a great opportunity for all of these clever people to come in with ideas about saving energy and sustainable production that they’d never be able to or have the scope to do it previously.
Good: But still the vision comes from you, right?
Yealands: Yes but it’s a coming-together of brains, not necessarily all mine. I want the smartest sustainable winery that I can get, with constraints – this is my budget, it has to fit into the landscape, I want natural products, resources, and to come up with a pretty good product on time and on budget. I would love to have more money and lots of other things but you’ve got to remember that we launched this winery in the start of the recession.
Good: In some ways the recession can be helpful.
Yealands: Absolutlely, I mean I’m bloody lucky. As the recession’s hit big corporates have been downsizing, so I’ve been finding the best of them. Now I’ve got a terrific team.
There’s always something happening and we tend to hold a few [green initiatives] back – we don’t want them all coming out at once!
Good: You also want to make better use of the wood products?
"We want to be self-sufficient for power to the winery, but to be able to be self-sufficient with your vehicles and houses would be absolutely magic."
Yealands: Yes! Our next major initiative is the vine prunings, which always look to be a massive waste of resource. I used them for kindling wood last year and I thought why split wood when you’ve got all these vine prunings. I thought we could collect these prunings and wrap it in a bundle and sell it as kindling through the Warehouse. But that was probably a little bit crazy.
I do think there’s terrific potential to make wood pellets for pellet burners. There’s not a lot of them in New Zealand but in Italy and places like that it’s a massive industry and you can actually get $200 a ton for pellets in New Zealand.
The energy in grape prunings is about two-thirds the heat value that’s in coal. And it’s clean burning, provided it’s dry. You can dry it down to about 14 percent moisture content by just leaving it in the open. So when I became aware we had this big energy source we looked using it as a source for methane, which goes straight into a motor which is hooked up to a generator.
Trouble is prunings aren’t syrupy enough - you need sludge which can be done but the cost of that was very high. So the next idea was to look at our LPG bill which was high because we use this to heat our water. In addition to the cost we have to offset the carbon from that LPG usage.
"To me a plant, a grapevine is a living thing. I think there is a connection (between people and plants) just what it is I don’t know. I do know that if you hit a tree with an axe it sends instant signals up and back down it again. It responds"
Why not heat our hot water using vine prunings? It’s so logical. We engaged a consultant to try and source a burner. He found a very expensive one in Switzerland. We applied for ECCA assistance and that application was turned down. We revisited it and by that time we’d fine-tuned the system and came across these pellet burners in America where very large houses don’t have electric heaters but do have a big boiler in the basement.
The company over there [USA] makes lots of these things and we got them to do a few modifications for us so it would fit our applications – they’re quite excited about it – and we’re actually importing two of them. They’ll cost about US$36,000 each. I reckon there’ll be about five bales a day and we’ve baled 150 this year – I expect we’ll only use 250 a year. Though the vineyard could produce 20,000 [bales].
If all goes well we won’t touch the LPG. We’ll just leave it in place for that first season. At the moment, our winery uses 47 percent of the power that a survey of all the other wineries in New Zealand put their usage in. We use 47 percent less than the average of all those respondents (ECCA). This exercise with the vine prunings will help that a little bit.
We may also use the prunings to fuel our refrigeration. You might think, How the hell are you going to do that. You’ve all experienced the old kerosene fridge. It’s just a little flame in the back of the fridge and that flame creates heat – well you can use that heat from your grape prunings to give you power for your refrigeration.
No one’s done it on large-scale refrigeration but it’s been done on small-scale. Most of our power in the winery is used in refrigeration – we’ve got massive big electric motors sucking up the power.
Mainly it’s (refrigeration) used for cold stabilisation of the wine. So you keep the wine stable for maybe a month and that’s down at a very low temperature, about 4 degrees. And that stops crystals forming in your bottle. It’s an essential part of the process – there are other ways of solving the problem but cold stabilisation seems to be the norm. Wine-makers are very traditional. It’s hard enough to get them to follow some of my other ideas.
Good: And the savings?
Yealands: This boiler project is probably going to cost us about 200,000 dollars and it’s going to have a one and a half year payback. You don’t get any better than that, do you?
Good: Your green ideas just seem to keep coming. What’s next?
Yealands: One of my wacky ideas is that I’m going to try playing music to my vines.
Good: Heavy metal or country?
Yealands: I haven’t decided that yet. To me a plant, a grapevine is a living thing. I think there is a connection (between people and plants) just what it is I don’t know. I do know that if you hit a tree with an axe it sends instant signals up and back down it again. A tree responds, whether it will response to soft music I don’t know. I’ll get the mickey, but who cares.
I’ve got to figure out how to distribute the music. I’ve been doing a bit of work on it and I’ve actually found you can send sound down a laser. I could have a rotating laser with sound beaming down that and that means you’ll only hear it where the laser is. The further you go along the laser the wider the light and the wider the sound. But that technology, they’ve only developed it for indoors, they haven’t got it going for outdoors but I’m talking with the people.
My wife says I’m mad, she says she’s going to leave me if I do it.
Good: Not everything is so, er, speculative.
Yealands: No, most of it has a guaranteed return on investment. A lot of the sustainable things that we’ve done have had a seven-year payback – even the photovoltaics which has a longer payback, the solar water heater’s got a shorter one, some of them we don’t even care or measure because it’s just way out there.
We’re looking forward to the day when we can actually use fuel off the grape mark. If we’re producing 10,000 tons of grapes it’s going to give us 2,500 ton of grape mark – the skins and the seeds and that’s generally either used as compost or some people use it for stock feed but with a bitof science you can actually generate gas from it (methane)and you could convert that methane to petrol, and you could use your own fuel sources. You could be totally self-sufficient.
We want to be self-sufficient for power to the winery, but to be able to be self-sufficient with your vehicles and houses would be absolutely magic.
