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| Maine coffee house installs Solar Wall using NASA technology |
Warming Up Wicked Joe’s Coffee
GUEST BLOG / By POWER, a NASA Earth Applied Sciences
project based at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia--Maine doesn’t just do lobsters. The state has a
growing coffee scene, including an organic micro-roaster based in Topsham. With
help from a NASA website, Wicked Joe coffee used space-based data to build the
plant that keeps its eco-friendly java flowing here on Earth.
“Wicked Joe is a family-owned
company committed to producing exceptional coffees using sustainable business
practices from crop to cup,” said Wicked Joe founder Bob Garver. Part of this
sustainability effort was finding a way to make its new roasting facility’s
production space as energy-efficient as possible. Typically, space heating
accounts for a building’s largest energy usage, especially in northern climates
– and Wicked Joe had a lot of space to heat.
“This is a clear span space of over 20,000
square feet [1,858 square meters] with a roughly 25-foot [7.7 meter] ceiling,”
Garver said of his production space. “This covers over 80% of our facility.”
Engineers suggested that a
solar wall would be an ideal way to heat the space efficiently. This solar wall
would be southward-facing, designed to generate heat from the sun’s radiation –
similar to a large, standing solar panel.
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Wicked
Joe’s current wholesale facility is the former Topsham [Maine] Naval Commissary
utilizes Loring Smart Roasters run on natural gas.
“This was the first time we had even heard of a solar wall,” Garver confessed. “But we were both open to and motivated to support the development of new technologies.”
To build Wicked Joe’s solar
wall, designers used the RETScreen Clean Energy Management Software, an
open-access energy analysis tool from Natural Resources Canada. The RETScreen
software automatically fetches climate and weather data from NASA’s Prediction
of Worldwide Energy Resource (POWER) website.
POWER is a NASA Earth Applied
Sciences project based at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia,
that improves on existing renewable energy information by creating new data
sets from satellite systems. It provides internet-based access to
Earth-observing data and models that are specifically tailored to assist in the
design of solar- and wind-powered renewable-energy systems.
Incorporating NASA satellite
data on sunlight, wind, temperature and precipitation patterns into RETScreen’s
feasibility analysis module, it was determined that a glazed solar wall would
capture 40% more heat and work better with Topsham’s northern latitude and
climate.
Shortly after the
installation of the wall, Wicked Joe discovered that the facility’s roasters
were an unexpected heating asset, which allowed its facility to use the solar
wall-less than it originally thought.
Garver estimated that the
solar wall is saving Wicked Joe more than $10,000 a year on its heating bill.
However, he emphasized that “the benefits of solar, in our view, go far beyond
the financial considerations or return on investment. While some regions may
have ‘more optimal’ conditions for solar, we believe that any place where the
sun shines is a good place for solar.” And that sunshine is helping Mainers
wake up to a wicked good cup of coffee.
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Wicked Joe’s retail location operated as
Bard Coffee is in Portland, Maine
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