Pelkmans-Vervoort invests in green battery

The poultry farm Pelkmans-Vervoort is located in Turnhout, just 100 metres from the Dutch border. A purebred family business with a big heart for animals, and chicks in particular.

Together with our commercial partner Eco Technics, who installed the battery in December 2023, we take a seat in the cozy kitchen of father and mother Vic and Maria Pelkmans Vervoort on a cloudy Thursday in February 2025.

Third generation of poultry farmers

Jan Pelkmans took over the management from his father Victor ‘Vic’ Pelkmans in 2010, who in turn succeeded his father. On their farm you can see with your own eyes the incredible progress that has been made in poultry farming. For example, Vic’s barns are still present and in use for storage, but son Jan has meanwhile built four new sheds using the best available techniques. There, 195,000 chicks, spread over 4 sheds, grow from cute yellow balls into full-fledged broilers in 6 weeks.

This level of optimisation of meat production requires high levels of monitoring, which is largely automatic at Pelkmans-Vervoort. For example, a feed computer monitors food and water intake. Two important parameters with which to monitor the health status of the chicks. Furthermore, the sheds are also climate-controlled by a computer.

The climate computer follows a temperature curve according to the needs of the chicks. The installed fans are also controlled by the climate computer. Limited ventilation for the one-day-old chicks that increases in line with the weight increase of the chickens. The four chicken sheds are equipped with an approved low-emission system. As a result, the company significantly reduces nitrogen emissions. This is done with 6 heaters per shed. These take care of the heating and also allow for the constant circulation of air in the shed. Hot air from the ridge is sent back lower over the chickens.

The emergency generator on site ensures that the ventilation continues to run at all times.

Everything is done to give the chicks a comfortable home. For example, Jan noticed that the newborn chicks become very restless from daylight – chickens prefer shade, he says. For that reason, the shutters in the roof of the shed that let daylight in remain closed for the first week, and are then gradually opened more often.

The lighting is provided by an economical LED installation. Every night, the lights go out for about 6 hours.

Impressive heating elements extract warm air from the shed ridge and blow it downwards, so the peat-covered floor always stays nice and dry for the growing chicks.

The sheds are cleaned very thoroughly between two breeding cycles. For this, Jan uses rainwater that is collected in wells under the sheds. At least 70,000 litres of water are used for cleaning, so the recovery of rainwater delivers a considerable saving on the higher-quality drinking water. Cleaning is followed by thorough disinfection.

Vic Pelkmans may be retired, but sitting still is not in his nature. We start our meeting with a technical discussion about the battery, prepared by father Pelkmans with an Excel overview of all costs and revenues from January 2024 to 2025. He uses a mass of figures to explain the energy policy of the family business.

‘In 2020, the prices for electricity were still so low that the cost price per chick was too small to justify investments in our own production. In 2022, we saw this change quickly and, with advice from Eco Technics, we installed 230 kWp of solar panels. We were extremely happy with that decision at the time, as prices rose astronomically in the autumn of 2022. We then received very nice prices on the injection market for the surplus energy.’

‘We had already had a visit from a battery supplier in 2022, but I didn’t think their business case was very credible. When Eco Technics held a presentation for our agricultural group a year later together with Octave (a battery producer, ed.), the story was more convincing. With an increase in self-consumption, extra earnings on imbalance and significant decreases in the cost per kWh, the payback period of a battery suddenly became interesting and we decided to make the investment.’

Our battery was installed at the end of 2023 and ensures that instead of paying, we get net money back on our energy bill. Our PV system was also expanded by 168 kW peak in October 2023. Given the current low injection prices, that was a less attractive investment. Indeed, if we look at the average injection price for 2024, it was only 40 EUR/MWh. Fortunately, thanks to the Yuso battery steering system, we can add income from imbalance to those low prices for injected solar power. For example, we see a price of 230 EUR/MWh for all electricity that was placed on the grid at imbalance prices. That’s one of the ways the battery steering yields a return. In addition, we avoid injection at negative prices with Octave’s PV curtailment control, which ensures that the production by the PV system is limited to the level of self-consumption. In this way, we don’t inject at negative prices, but nor do we have to buy energy on the grid.

In addition to the smart control of the battery, Yuso will also launch smart steering of the PV system, ‘PV Curtailment’, at Pelkmans-Vervoort from 1 March 2025. In this way, the PV system will generate additional revenues from imbalance.

How exactly does that work?

In the event of very negative imbalance prices, the PV system will be switched off. So the installation at Pelkmans-Vervoort will generate an additional net income of around EUR 5,000 per year compared to the situation without PV Curtailment.