Winery Water Energy Savings

The California Energy Commission is a sponsor for a project titled, “Winery Water Energy Savings”, for a technology demonstration and deployment to integrate two water and energy efficiency technologies into the operations of a large-scale wine production facility in Sonoma County. These are existing technologies that have yet to be widely adopted in commercial or industrial processes across California due to implementation barriers. Download the Fact Sheet here.

The overarching goal is to demonstrate the viability of these technologies and assist with their adoption in industry for the conservation of water and energy. The first technology involves an efficient osmosis water treatment technology to treat water to potable standards for reuse within the facility in the barrel washing process. If successful, it would reduce 90% of the water used annually for this industry-wide procedure. The second technology will reduce energy used for stabilizing white wine by utilizing an innovative “wine-to-wine” heat exchanger system.

Project objectives are the following:

    Increase the methods in the industry to achieve water and energy efficiency and advance widespread acceptance and deployment of these technologies.
    • Evaluate and document the barriers preventing widespread implementation of indoor graywater reuse as well as potential solutions for overcoming those obstacles
    • Broadly publicize effective strategies to highlight technology benefits in order to garner interest in these methods
    Evaluate the performance and resource savings of the two technologies in a large-scale demonstration.

Sponsored by the California Energy Commission EPIC Program in response GFO 15-317
Project Partner: Jackson Family Wines

Work Products:

    • Barriers to Onsite Treated Water Reuse Research Brief [ pdf ]
    • Identifying and Overcoming Barriers to Onsite Non-Potable Water Reuse in California from Local Stakeholder Perspectives 2019 [ Open Source access ]