Kona Brewing Company, a Hawai'i-born and Hawai'i-based craft brewery, has always had sustainability in mind: brewing the freshest beer closest to market, which helps to minimize its carbon footprint by reducing shipping of raw materials, finished beer and wasteful packaging materials. In recent months Kona Brewing Company has seen several of its environmental initiatives reach fruition. In October, both of its pubs on the Big Island and O'ahu became Certified Green Restaurants by the Green Restaurant Association and in December the brewery made Hawai'i's first certified organic beer. Now they can boast that their Kailua-Kona brewery and pub is the first beer production facility in Hawai'i to go solar.
The brewery teamed up with Sunetric, the largest Hawaii-owned and operated commercial solar energy contractor, and installed a 229-kilowatt solar energy generating system, which went online in May. The roof-mounted grid-tied photovoltaic system is estimated to produce an average of 900 kilowatts of electricity each day, which will allow Kona Brewing Company to offset 60 percent of its current electricity usage, a savings of more than $100,000 in electricity expenditures per year at the current commercial retail electricity rate. It will include 880 260-watt solar modules on the brewery's rooftop space and a real-time monitor to show how much energy the solar system is generating at the entrance to the restaurant.
"In the long run, the cost savings in utilizing solar power are obvious," said Kona Brewing Company President and CEO Mattson Davis. "But even more important, our system will provide improved environmental performance and reduced carbon emissions. We feel we have a responsibility to take a leadership role in establishing production methods that minimize taxing our environment. It makes economic sense and it is the right thing to do. It's not just good business, it's our way of life."
Over the next 30 years Sunetric estimates Kona Brewing Company's PV system will prevent approximately 7,730 tons of carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere annually, or about 5 million car trips to a local grocery store, and the solar array offsets 16,425 barrels of oil that would otherwise be burned to make electricity.