Sector: Commercial & Industrial
Council: Moira Shire
Upgrade: 492 kW Solar PV, LED lighting and Tesla batteries
Installation Partner: Cherry Energy Solutions

“We have a national footprint of about 600 people country-wide and we run about 300 odd trucks. We cart mainly food products and agri-business.

“The business is a big user of electricity and gas, and the rising prices are very hard to mitigate – going back to your customers to get price increases, so we had to look at other options in order to mitigate those costs.

“What prompted us to look at an energy efficiency upgrade is we wanted to make an environmental statement; we wanted to make our customers and our staff feel good about working here; and we wanted to save money on rising utility prices.

“We chose solar to save on electricity bills and things like LED lights, the spacing of those lights, air conditioning units, were all identified as potential savings.

“The good thing about this is we will free up between 15-20% of our bills over a 12 month period which means that money goes back into other things in the business.

“The whole process is handled by the Sustainable Melbourne Fund – they gave us an account manager and the account manager walked us through, and he was really useful. We basically give them our financials, they get the council permission – we were very pleasantly surprised that we had it in place so quickly. The single point of contact makes it much easier to go through the whole process. If we had have been dealing with more people it might have made it a bit more tricky.

“The repayments were attractive because they came out of the council rates once a quarter, rather than every month, so it makes it a lot more manageable than servicing a normal loan.

Mitchell Booth – Principal, Booth Transport