What is the pence per litre of dairy farm electricity use?

Needless to say, this is very high, but not a surprise nonetheless.

However, what is a surprise is that very few in the industry know the true cost of dairy farm energy use, namely a pence per litre (ppl) figure.

Whilst benchmarking allows for a specific ppl breakdown for other costs on the farm, until now electricity has always been a generalised figure, often extracted from electricity bills.

Step forward the Ulster University (UU), specifically their Intelligent System Research Centre, based at Magee Campus.

The chart above illustrates the typical energy on a dairy farm.

Supported by the Ulster Farmers Union, AgriSearch, CAFRE and Dale Farm, UU are developing iTEMiD (Intelligent Energy Management in dairy), which once developed will enable dairy farms to optimise their on-farm energy usage through tracking and analysis. The dairy sector was identified as a suitable target pilot industry for iTEMiD given the high energy use and the opportunity to explore the reduction of energy cost via minimisation of energy use.

UU will be shortly undertaking a pilot project on six dairy farms in Northern Ireland. On each farm, UU will install a metered system, record energy data and provide assessment of energy use; Joules (energy) per litre of milk.

Throughout the pilot, UU aim to develop a prototype low cost, real time energy monitoring system capable of measuring the precise energy usage across the milk production process. Crucially, this will be conducted in real time and not via electricity bills, thereby enhancing the quality of the data.

Following on from the pilot, UU have secured AgriSearch funding to support the development of the software. The plan is to develop the iTEMiD software to automatically analyse on-farm energy and production data, enabling the generation of reports and alerts when energy use exceeds a specific threshold. If successful, there is the potential for this to be rolled out to other farming sectors. Energy savings will lead to reduced electricity bills, which in turn will improve cash flow on dairy farms.

Crucially, iTEMiD will prove a real time pence per litre which will have an invariable benefit to the dairy farm.

Previously, when addressing high energy bills, farmers would have looked at incorporating renewable energy into their businesses, either in the form of wind turbines or solar PV technology.

However, with the closure of the NIRO there is currently no incentive to adapt in this manner.

Crucially by adopting renewables in pursuit of the NIRO, it did little to affect behavioural change which can only be achieved by looking at how the energy is being used and where savings (both cost and efficiency) could be made.

From a policy perspective iTEMiD will have a longer-term positive impact. As we know climate change will drive policy in the years to come both in terms of farming and the wider use of fossil fuel powered energy, specifically the push to net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Such is the use of electricity on local dairy farms any move to improving energy efficiency will help our industry play its part in achieving these environmental targets, and via a pence per litre measure of energy use.

It will allow our sector to demonstrate good practice as well as reducing those high electricity bills in the drive towards decarbonisation.

DfE have recently published their Call for Evidence on Future Energy Policy in Northern Ireland and one of the topics is Carbon Capture and Storage and with this level of analysis being available, the dairy sector could be at the cutting edge of energy transition in Northern Ireland.

If the dairy sector is to play a key role in tackling climate change, dairy farms must be able to analyse the energy use on their individual businesses and iTEMiD may be a key tool in achieving this.