When Legend’s customer looked to place a new greenhouse for its growing operations, it trusted members of the Legend Energy Advisors team to determine the most favorable energy environment and explore infrastructure opportunities.

The customer sought an integrated growing operation for 4 future greenhouses reliant on renewable energy to light evening growing and natural gas to create CO2 to be pumped into the greenhouse to feed the plants.

Assessing Market Opportunities

The customer identified 3 regions in the US that possessed the right growing conditions for the greenhouses. It was up to Legend’s team to determine which of these regions had the right energy infrastructure and markets to support a highly energy intensive operation and provide access to cost-effective renewable energy.

Legend narrowed the search down to a location where major wind infrastructure installations would not only produce abundant and reliable renewable energy but also where electricity prices occasionally dropped below $0 at night, dramatically reducing overall energy costs. Legend helped structure customized block and index electricity supply products and presented 6 different scenarios for the customer to choose from before executing the strategy on their behalf.

Legend then explored the opportunity to connect to an interstate natural gas pipeline, thereby bypassing the utility to purchase natural gas in the wholesale market, reducing cost and enabling market flexibility.

Legend Energy Advisors continues to act as a trusted partner to navigate all new energy procurement contract negotiations and manage daily natural gas nominations, balancing, and overall strategy management.

Creating Infrastructure Solutions

During the procurement strategy phase it was determined that the lowest cost option to get gas supply to the greenhouse would be to tap into an interstate pipeline that ran near the location and construct a customer-owned pipeline lateral.

The utility would have charged the customer $600k for the utility pipeline construction, while Legend was able to complete the project for $450k. Additionally, having the independent tap allowed us to access the wholesale market rather than relying on the utility’s tariff rate. Using active nominations and balancing, we are able to save an additional $25,000 for the customer annually.

Legend’s team members managed the construction of the pipeline connection itself and sought additional opportunities for infrastructure efficiencies. One such opportunity came in the form of capturing and using the CO2 burned from the natural gas to feed and grow the plants in the greenhouses for an annual CO2 savings of 11,700 tons.

Once in operation the customer was having issues with Variable Frequency Drives and motor controls failing following lightning storms. Grounding and surge protection proved ineffective, so Legend installed power metering to diagnose the issues. Through the LegendAnalytics™ platform the root cause of the problem was discovered to be voltage spikes. Legend recommended voltage arresters and the problem was eliminated.

Automated and Customized Demand Response System

Additionally, by combining our LegendAnalytics™ and Markets services Legend was able to put together a customized demand response program for the customer to participate in off-peak demand response with automated load shedding based on remote controls. This controls system allows the greenhouse to respond to market dynamics to manage market price risk as well as transmission and distribution costs during the Coincidental Peaks set during the summers, which gives the customer the ability to sustainably interact with the wholesale electricity grid.

Results

The utility would have charged the customer $600k for the pipeline tap construction, while Legend was able to complete the project for $450k. Additionally, having the independent tap allowed us to access the wholesale market rather than relying on the utility’s tariff rate. Using active nominations and balancing, we are able to save an additional $25,000 annually.

”Legend has been a long term trusted partner helping us tackle energy holistically starting with site selection that gives us energy infrastructure advantages, pipeline taps, power generation, demand response, real-time voltage monitoring and designing complex energy market products that help us optimize constantly changing energy markets. They understand our day to day operations helping us understand how actions behind our meters impact our market exposure every day.”

VP Asset Development – Agriculture Client