For years, dairy farmer Peter Mulheron had a steady procession of solar salespeople turning up at his farm in Swan Marsh in south-west Victoria.
It wasn’t that he was opposed to renewable energy. Mulheron, a fourth-generation dairy farmer who runs around 240 cows with his wife Trish and son James, wanted to cut his exposure to rising electricity prices and an unreliable rural grid.
The problem was that conventional rooftop solar didn’t really fit the way his farm used electricity.
“We use a lot of power in the dark, so early morning and late evening, so solar panels just never added up for us,” Mulheron told the Renewables in Agriculture conference that is being held in Orange, NSW, this week.
At one point, he signed up for a solar system, before an electrician friend sat him down at the kitchen table and convinced him that what he had been sold did not match the farm’s actual energy use.
