When Jacco Besuijen gives a PowerPoint presentation, you’d be hard-pressed to know he’s a manager at one of the Netherlands largest tomato growers. Instead he could be mistaken for an energy provider.
“Our greenhouses have three key needs: heat, electricity and CO2, in addition to water,” he explained to the Weekly Times, on an exclusive tour last month.
“To power this we need half a megawatt of installed power per hectare, across our 418ha of greenhouses, which is overseen by eight energy managers in one location who monitor all 52 greenhouse sites around the Netherlands.
“In the early days we used oil boilers, then gas, followed by cogeneration but now because the Netherlands imports a lot of gas from Russia and because of the need to stop using fossil fuels we are looking to use geothermal heat.
“Over the past two years, three of our growers have invested 25 million Euros to go to a depth of 2200m to a temperature of 82 degrees Celsius in order to tap into geothermal heat.”
