We are in a changing world, people are looking to source things more locally than ever and so growers are trying to produce all year long to answer the growing demand. Whether it is to grow vegetables or flowers, nowadays a commercial state-of-the-art greenhouse has to be productive all year long and in our climate, that requires more than just the sun during our cold winters, they need a lot of energy to heat and light up their installation.
In some areas, grid power might be a great option, for example in the Province of Quebec some special rates are offered to greenhouse growers to make it more interesting to grow food all year long. However, in other places like Ontario electricity is more expensive and not as easily available so it can be a lot more complex to find the right solution while being competitive on the market. Growers often have to look at many options and scenarios to find that sweet spot where they can have a great and reliable set up and make a reasonable margin and be able to compete in their industry. Power is overall one of the most important costs of their operations so it has to be taken very seriously. Many factors have to be looked at like insulation, type of crops, accessibility and cost of grid power, reliability, price of gas/natural gas…
Some interesting facts : generators are an option chosen by Ontario growers to power their greenhouse partly because of their usually unwanted by-products. A generator produces heats when it works like all combustion engines and it emits CO2, two things that can be very useful for a greenhouse, how? Well, heat is reused to heat up the greenhouse as a complement to the heating solution they use and CO2 can be used to fertilize plants. So what might seem like a lesser green option, might become greener and greener when you factor in all the details of the global solution.
To learn more about solutions to power greenhouses in Ontario listen to the latest edition of the Let’s Talk Energy Webinar with Toromont Cat specialists and Ontario growers Rosa Flora and Great Lake Greenhouses owners, see the webinar:
