Berkeley Lab’s BEST Winery Tool Helps Reduce Energy and Water Costs

Berkeley, CA—California wineries now have an easy-to-use, computer-based tool and a handbook to help them reduce energy and water costs, thanks to researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who worked with Fetzer Vineyards to develop the computer-based tool.

BEST (Benchmarking and Energy and Water Savings Tool) Winery compares the performance of a target winery to a similar reference winery. BEST’s reference winery is based on a very efficient winery using state-of-the art but commercially available energy- and water-efficient technologies.

After evaluating how the target winery compares to the reference winery, the user can view the tool’s inventory of available efficient practices and technologies to select those measures that will save money, energy and water at the target winery. BEST Winery is available as an Excel spreadsheet that can be run on any PC operating Windows 2000 or higher.