For those of you who have visited our Wine Estate & Gardens lately, you may have noticed a Tesla Energy electric vehicle charger located in a prime location. No, it’s not Tesla Energy CEO Elon Musk’s personal parking space (although he’s welcome anytime), but it does provide a sneak peek into an exciting collaboration that has been fermenting between Kendall-Jackson and Tesla Energy for over 2 years.

At 8pm on April 30th, Elon Musk took the stage at Tesla Energy’s Design Studio in Hawthorne, CA to announce an exciting new business product offering focused on piloting state of the art stationary energy storage systems in the residential, commercial and utility sectors. As a result of this program, Kendall-Jackson has collaborated with Tesla Energy to installed 21 battery systems across 6 of our wineries in Sonoma, Napa and Monterey Counties. These systems have the capacity to hold a combined 4.2 MW of energy, which will allow us to mitigate for our most energy-intensive practices in wine production: refrigeration/cooling, lighting, compressed air, and process water treatment. This is an important tool in optimizing our operations, especially around harvest where our energy consumption increases significantly.

This is a momentous innovation in energy and technology, and we are proud that K-J is an early collaborator with a company like Tesla Energy that shares our commitment to innovation and sustainable energy management. The basis of the collaboration is two-fold: to pilot innovative technologies that reduce our natural resource consumption, and to invest in cost-saving initiatives that demonstrate a competitive return on investment. The cost of energy increases every year, and we need to proactively plan for these costs as we continue to grow our production capacity and output. The Tesla Energy systems offer us one of the most advanced energy storage solutions currently in the market to help improve our energy and operational efficiencies through the consumption of clean power while simultaneously reducing our costs. California is heading towards a cleaner, more renewable energy portfolio over the next 15 years, and K-J is again ahead of the curve in this pursuit as we continue to implement onsite solar and stationary energy storage.

Innovation is at the heart of how we operate our day-to-day business – it is how we run an efficient and smart company, and also a key component of our strategy for growth. When Tesla Energy approached us to collaborate on energy storage, we recognized that this relationship would be a first of its kind in the wine business. We at Kendall-Jackson are excited that this collaboration with Tesla Energy advances our sustainability goals while also positively impacting our bottom line. Come by for a test drive!