Energy Efficiency: Center of Effort

Your brand contributes to a higher standard of wine business through its sustainable practices.
You can take pride in the way your brand protects the people and the planet. When you tell your customers what it takes to make a sustainable wine, they will share in that satisfaction.

With heightened awareness of climate change, pollution, and environmental depletion, it’s no surprise that nearly 6 in 10 consumers are willing to change their purchasing habits to help reduce negative environmental impacts (IMB Institute for Business Value, 2020).

Let your customers know how your brand protects natural and human resources by telling your Sustainable Story.
 

It's here! A Brand New 30-minute Online Course Your brand has made the incredible achievement of getting SIP Certified but your staff may not be sure exactly what that means, let alone how to communicate it with customers. This brand new, 30-minute online training course helps your team: Learn what sustainability really looks like in the wine industry. Identify 7 specific ways YOUR brand protects the people and the planet. Feel empowered to share their new knowledge in customer communications. Click here to take and share the new course!

Energy efficiency is about using less fuel and energy to perform the same tasks and get the same results.
When a business makes energy efficient changes, they combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption.

There are several ways a sustainable wine business can make energy-efficient improvements. Read on to learn how at Center of Effort, many small changes around the winery compounded to have a massive impact on their overall energy use.
 

Energy Efficiency at Center of Effort

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Center of Effort sees this clearly when they look at the tremendous energy expense savings they have realized since making Energy Efficient improvements around their winery:

• Energy time-of-use adjustments on their cooling system, wastewater aerators, and other heavy energy usage equipment.
• Implementing night-air cooling of barrel rooms and case goods storage areas to minimize HVAC use.
• Investing in a small chiller enabling them to bring tank temperatures down on select tanks rather than the entire plant down.
• Installing a quickdraw door to address insulation loss.

These are just a few of the areas in which they took action to reduce their energy demand.

“A lot of the changes were pretty simple and had varying impact, but all together it compounded into very meaningful differences," says Kevin Bargetto, Associate Winemaker at Center of Effort. He continues, "With these changes, our entire winery facility, tasting room and offices are entirely solar powered. In fact, we are running net negative, meaning we are even sending generated power back to the grid!”
 

Their solar project went live back in 2016, and Nathan Carlson, Winemaker and General Manager, says that it “showed 100% ROI over 4 years, no problem.”
Read the fourth story in the Sustainable Stories Series article published in Grape & Wine Magazine!
 

The Simple Yet Powerful Tool The new 30-minute online training course is LIVE and ready! Here are a few ways to use it as a training tool for your entire team:   Training for the Whole Team Bring the worksheet to your next staff meeting, put the training course on a screen, and go through it together. SIP Tip: We recommend you invite your farmer, winemaker, general manager, and any other key staff so they can tell you all about specific sustainable practices.     Got remote employees? No problem! Sign in to your virtual meeting platform, share your screen, and watch the course together.   Onboarding Use this course in your onboarding to help familiarize your new staff with your brand’s values: Have a team meeting & talk about sustainability. Send your new hire off to do the course. Meet again to finalize your Sustainable Story. SIP Tip: record yourself going through the course and include it in your onboarding packet.