Australian brewery reduces carbon footprint with rooftop solar –

Moon Dog Brewing, an independent Australian craft brewery based out of Melbourne, is exploring ways to reduce its carbon footprint and drive environmental sustainability.

To this end, the Moon Dog team selected Energis, a residential and commercial energy solutions company, to design a solar system that would reduce their reliance on using energy from the grid and lower their energy costs. Energis designed, installed and commissioned a 99.85 kW rooftop mounted solar system utilising 317 solar panels powered by FIMER’s PVS-100 inverter.

Have you read?
A bottle of liquid sunshine: California craft brewery installs 2.1-MW solar array
Solar-Plus-Batteries to Power Hawaiian Brewery

Energis selected FIMER’s PVS-100 as they were especially suited for the string sizing and other site-specific requirements for this project.

This follows a general trend spanning the beer industry worldwide, with smaller independent brew pubs and large international beer companies seeing the potential that solar power holds when it comes to offsetting the energy-intensive process of beer-making.

Related: New Twist on Green Beer as Anheuser Busch Commits to 100 Percent Renewables

Budweiser owned by AB InBev, signed the largest ever pan-European solar power deal for its 14 breweries spread across Europe in 2020, along with Heineken’s Sol brand committing to brewing with only 100% solar energy in the same year.

**_{Moon Dog’s solar system inspired them to release a limited-edition beer named “the future is bright”, a solar-powered IPA (India Pale Ale).}** **_{Credit: Moon Dog}**

Hot spots such as Australia, Italy, Germany, Singapore, Belgium, the Netherlands and the US are leading the charge when it comes to solarized breweries, and China is predicted to be one of the fastest-growing markets for beer consumption.

“We are proud to have played a key role in helping this brewery reduce their carbon emissions and lower operating costs for years to come,” said Jason Venning, country manager for FIMER, Australia and New Zealand.

“This is a great example of how FIMER’s PVS-100 high-powered string inverter, through its dual-stage topology, enables greater energy production and saves businesses more money over the lifetime of the system, thus enabling a faster return on investment.”

Subscribe to ’s free, weekly newsletter for more stories like this

The addition of Aurora Vision, FIMER’s monitoring solution, allows Karl Van Buuren, Moon Dog co-founder and the rest of the team to monitor the breweries entire solar plant remotely. Van Buuren said: “Our site, like many other food and beverage sites, is power-hungry, we have boilers, chill units, and big packaging lines. Using FIMER’s monitoring solution allows us to see how much our solar is producing, which helps offset the large energy-using equipment on site. We can see what time of day we are generating the most solar energy, together with how much we are producing and consuming on a month-to-month basis.”

Since installation and commissioning, Moon Dog Brewing has generated over 110 MWh, saving approximately 20 tonnes of CO₂ emissions each month.