As a film technician, for me the most noticeable impact of climate change in Ireland has been the increasing wind speeds – in the past 18 months I’ve been on two commercials that were closed down because it was too windy to shoot; that had never happened to me in the previous 15 years. However, there are may be some positive side effects to this new phenomena, energy independence being chief among them.  (more…)

Splash! That's 2 millivolts, thank you!

“Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain…” What if our beloved Irish rain was actually a national energy asset? Following on from my last post about piezoelectricity generated from foot and car traffic, brilliant minds at CEA/Leti-Minatec, an R&D institute in Grenoble, France, have recently developed a system that can harvest energy from falling raindrops.  “Our work could be considered as a good alternative to power systems in raining outdoor environments where solar energy is difficult to exploit,” Thomas Jager told PhysOrg.com, and he could be speaking specifically to Ireland, where, especially in winter, we can’t guarantee the sun, but can expect a healthy dose of rain.

For those of you with a technical bent, this is how it works: the scientists use a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymer, a piezoelectric material that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. When a raindrop impacts the 25-micrometer-thick PVDF, the polymer starts to vibrate. Electrodes embedded in the PVDF are used to recover the electrical charges generated by the vibrations, thus converting the raindrop’s mechanical energy into electrical energy.

Slow falling, large raindrops generate the most energy because raindrops falling at high speeds often lose some energy due to splash.  The scientists haven’t yet developed the mechanism for storing this energy, but surely with developments in wind and wave power this can’t be far behind?

A number of other organizations are working on piezoelectric devices as well: Zhong Lin Wang at the Georgia Institute of Technology has devised a sensor that can harvest mechanical energy by bending zinc oxide nanowires: he wants to put it in a shoe, so as you walk you generate power. There’s also Trevor Baylis, inventor of the wind-up radio, who designed and used a piezoelectric boot to power his mobile phone during a hike across the Namib desert.  TEXON International is looking to raise £1m to further develop these electric shoes.

One of the beauties of piezoelectricity is that the tools involved are not beyond the reach of a clever diy inventor: while not everyone has PDVF lying around, the essence of piezoelectricity is a copper wire, that when bent produces a negative/positive charge; when the pressure on the wire is relieved, an electrical current can be detected.  So who’s up for singing in the rain?

How many volts from a dog on a trampoline?

Imagine generating electricity with every step you take; that every time you drive or cycle, energy is sent to the national grid; and that even your workout is powering the lights and heat of the gym, replacing fossil fuel – sounds great, right?  Well, piezoelectricity is here.

Piezoelectricity is basically the use of certain materials to transform kinetic energy into electricity.  I wrote in another blog about the development of piezoelectric floor tiles that turn foot traffic into electricity; now the first practical installation of this kind is in place at a Sainsbury’s supermarket in Gloucester, England, where “kinetic road plates” are being used to produce 30 kW of electricity every hour. The company’s press release describes the process as a more physical process (plates are pushed down by passing cars to create rocking motions that turn generators) than a piezoelectrical one, but the broader concept of using transient motion to generate electricity is the same.

There’s no reason why this simple, cheap and sustainable type of energy conversion can’t be used in businesses and homes all over Ireland.  And genius scientists are also working on an even more Irish-friendly form of energy conversion: raindrops into electricity, in my next post!

How would you like to get your electricity from wind power, and at cheaper rates than the ESB?  It’s really easy to switch to Airtricity online, all you need is your ESB account number (on your bill), and if you have the number of the meter reading to hand it makes things even quicker.  Within 5 minutes you can be finished with ESB and fossil fuels!

Airtricity is owned by Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE).  The renewable-energy company, established in 1999, was the first independent supplier of green energy to customers both in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.  It has now built up a considerable infrastructure of wind farms across Ireland, with 17 onshore wind farms generating 878 mega watts of electricity – enough to power 180,000 households. At present, the company provides green energy to just over 60,000 customers across the island of Ireland, of which 45,000 are SMEs and 15,000 are domestic customers.

Airtricity has also just announced that they are to create 200 jobs in the Irish market, in the areas of sales, customer support, billing and support services. Fifty of the positions will be created in Airtricity’s headquarters in Sandymount, Co Dublin, with the remaining 150 comprising outsourced roles.  Green, clean, and profitable: these are the kind of green shoots that matter.

Whatever the outcome of the UK government’s strategy for the various proposed eco-town projects (it will probably be late summer before the final shortlist is announced) the eco-town initiative has generated some good ideas that may become standard solutions for future buildings. The principal message (as we all know by now) is that lifestyle

European Initiatives …  Architects, engineers, planners and sustainability experts are looking progressively more to the eco-towns on the continent as models of what could be achieved in Ireland or the UK . Projects in Germany (Freiberg), Denmark (Copenhagen) and Sweden (Malmö and Hammarby Sjöstad – suburbs of Stockholm) all demonstrate how lifestyle changes lead to reduced environmental impact. Check out architecture week for Tango Housing in Malmö by Moore Ruble Yudell Architects.

Green Lifestyle … People have changed the way they travel and the way they live domestically and they have managed to cut their energy use and carbon footprint without affecting their quality of life. This has persuaded the British government to cite them as inspiration for the UK’s own eco-town initiative.  In Ireland and the UK, we use power stations, import our fuel from outside the country and then throw all the heat away. In Holland and Germany, they are not afraid of being accused of taking the sensible approach and try to keep their energy within the community. In Sweden, historical ownership is not allowed to impede rational measures for sustainable development. We have much to learn from these approaches.

In Europe, there is also a major difference in the approach to solving national issues such as the one of reducing carbon output from housing. There, the initiatives tend to be directed by local authorities, with much greater emphasis on collaboration between the private developers and the local authorities. Here, our local authorities mostly do not possess the resources or funding and developers are not given the same encouragement, back-up or indeed, incentives. The big house-building firms in Ireland and the UK  do not believe that large scale development using the Passivhaus standards is commercially viable here at present, and so use this as an argument for aiming towards lower standards than can actually be achieved. I would have thought that the main objective when designing an eco-town would be to achieve the best possible standards of energy efficiency.

Transition Towns Initiative …  For those of you not already aware of this movement, have a look at the question posed on the Transition Towns site  for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?”

Big question – but change will be achieved if enough people want it.

As the rainbow coloured dew falls from the burst construction bubble, landing on the streets and town lands of Ireland, we look around at the remnants of what is left behind. What have you and your family been left with after buying into an over-inflated, over-priced housing market?

Non-existent building control and greedy builders, who cut every corner imaginable in a bid to increase profits and rush to the next exorbitantly overpriced job, have left you with a poorly constructed and overpriced home. Inadequate insulation, minimums of control of your heating system and incorrectly sized boilers and radiators mean that you are spending far too much of your increasingly hard earned money trying to heat your home to the comfortable level you envisaged when you first set out on the road to buying or building your new home.

There is, however, some light at the end of the tunnel in these times of doom and gloom. The Home Energy Saving (HES) Scheme which was recently launched by the government under the auspices of Sustainable Energy Ireland (SEI) provides for sizeable grants towards retrofitting works to improve the energy efficiency of you home. The types and amounts of these grants are detailed below:

* Please note that while you are entitled to apply for each Measure there is a minimum requirement that the grant amount in the first application must be €500 or greater. The BER grant cannot form part of this €500 amount.

Most houses built prior to 2006 will have inadequate levels of each of the measures outlined above. As a result the scheme is open to all homeowners who own a house which was built before 2006. It doesn’t matter if you have more than one home, a grant can be received for each individual house.

You must apply for and receive confirmation of grant approval prior to buying any materials or carrying out any works. All works must be carried out by a contractor from the SEI’s Registered List. If undertaking a BER, these must be carried out by a registered BER Assessor.

In future blogs I will explain in more detail: how to apply, the benefits of carrying out each measure and the savings you can expect to make on future energy costs.

I intend over the next few weeks to explain all the main elements of passive house, from triple glazed windows, through heat recovery ventilation, airtightness and so forth. I would like firstly to explain what exactly a passive house is, however, so here goes.
Firstly, I need to clarify that the term passive house is perhaps a little misleading because you might have the wrong impression that it concerns only ‘houses’, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I have visited a range of passive house projects across Europe, including passive house schools, passive house offices, passive house community centres, passive house churches and, believe it or not, even a passive house fire station. So, you can build pretty much anything to the ‘passive house standard’ (including a passive house house, by the way!). 

The next common urban myth about passive houses is that you have to follow a very strict design style in order to achieve the required standard. Week in week out we receive planning permissions drawings from people who want to test their house design to see if it can achieve the passive house standard. We’ve seen all sorts of shapes, sizes and orientations and the vast majority of them, with enough insulation, high quality glazing and good airtightness can pretty easily achieve the required standard. So, the passive house standard is not as limiting as many people assume in terms of building design.

Next, I need to emphasise that the passive house is not magic. You’ll read from time to time that passive houses are buildings that don’t need heating, but that is simply not true. All buildings in a climate even as mild as Ireland need some form of heating – even if it is a tiny fraction compared to a conventional building. As a example, my demonstration home, ‘Out of the Blue’, in Wicklow, uses just 10% of the heating energy compared to a conventional house, but it does need that 10%. So a passive house is not a zero-heating house, but a building that needs a very small back-up heating system and without the need for radiators or underfloor heating.

At a more technical level, there are three criteria that must be achieved in order to reach the passive house standard, as follows:
- Maximum annual space heating demand per square metre of 15 kWh
- Minimum airtightness of 0.6 air changes per hour measured at a pressure of 50 Pascal
- Maximum annual primary energy demand per square metre (for all electrical use, even white goods) of 120 kWh

So I would conclude that the passive house standard is a method of design and construction that delivers a building with a very low heating energy demand. Nothing more, nothing less. I will be giving a step by step guide on the main elements of the passive house over the next few weeks, so stand by.

What’s a green building?  One covered in solar panels and bristling with turbines?  One that proclaims its greenness by looking different?  One that costs 15% more than a ‘conventional’ building?

For British architect Howard Liddell, the answer is none of the above.

At a one-day symposium on sustainability in TCD recently, Liddell outlined his ideal green building: it looks conventional, costs no more to build, but is so well insulated and airtight that there is almost no need for heating, and certainly no need for what he calls “eco-bling”.

The main problem, as he sees it, is that technologies are an expensive add-on with a long payback time.  The sensible and cost-effective route to a green and eco-building is effective insulation.

Unfortunately, eco-bling is flavour of the month, and Liddell was particularly critical of new building regulations in some British local authorities that now require a minimum 10% of on-site renewable technologies — expensive and ineffective wind turbines on top of buildings, when they should be on remote, windy sites.

In an inspiring presentation, Liddell,  principal architect with the British-based Gaia Group, argued that we need to make insulation sexy. “Eco-minimalism, not eco-bling.”

Effective insulation alone, he said, could halve the energy demand, and significantly reduce fuel poverty.

The main challenge, in Ireland as in Britain, will be to retro-fit a high standard of insulation to existing buildings. What’s more, each building will need an individual solution.

And you can’t just fill cavity walls with foam, he argues: those walls were designed to breathe so, if you block them up, you simply create a moisture problem on the inside.

Likewise, it is not enough to seal every crack with gunge.  For a start, the gunge will crack, so you won’t get an airtight seal. And again, you have to worry about moisture buffering.

Other issues that he identified are: effective testing of a building’s air tightness; and indoor air quality in an airtight building (especially moisture content, and off-gassing from materials and furniture), making choice of materials essential.

To be truly ‘green’, he recommended using sheep’s wool insulation, as he felt there were issues with the chemicals used to treat insulation made from recycled newspaper.

In a wide ranging and fascinating talk, Liddell also recommended: mass-timber construction (not just beautiful to work with, but also good for sequestering carbon dioxide); ‘nail-free building’ (securing well designed, well fitting pieces with just a few screws), which doesn’t damage the wood and makes repairs and alterations, and recycling much easier; and low-flush toilets that use less than 2 litres of water — already achieved on aircraft toilets.

If Liddell is right, and every building leaves a customised solution, then on the plus side this would be a major job creation project architects, and the insulation and construction industries.

For more on Howard Liddell’s eco-minimalist architecture, check out his new book here.

Mary Mulvihill’s new guide to easy, sustainable living is Drive Like a Woman, Shop Like a Man (2009).  Click here to suggest a tip, and be in with a chance to win a copy of the book.

(c) Mary Mulvihill 2009  http://marymulvihill.net/

If you are planning any eco-building scheme, then you will place green energy somewhere near the top of your list. It is very easy to simply look at the descriptions issued by the manufacturers of renewable energy production systems, but how do you equate the figures with what you actually need? This is a question that I am frequently asked and there is no other way to answer it than to use …

…Simple Mathematics …  The following is simply an exercise in statistics and does not address the ethical issues of choosing energy supply, but all the same it is a task which must be tackled before any sustainable building can be successfully designed. For those of you who grow pale at the sight of calculations – then accept my apologies; but the concept is an essential element in good eco-design, and if need be, you ought to obtain balanced professional guidance.

Energy Units … You should calculate energy requirements by using units of energy – kilowatt hours in terms of time (kWh/day) – in other words the amount of power used over 24 hours. In the UK, the total amount of energy consumed * by each person is reckoned to average about 125 kWh/day, but this figure obviously covers all power usage. Depending on the source of information, it is estimated that the average UK home uses electrical power of between 3300 kWh/year (or just over 9 kWh/day) and 4700 kWh/year (about 13kWh/day). Northern Ireland’s domestic consumption for 2007 averaged 4400 kWh/year (12 kWh/day). Ireland’s consumption per capita is roughly equal to the UK. Check your electricity bills to see how you compare.

To give an example of how appliances measure up, if your home uses an average of 500 W (0.5 kW) then it will consume 12 kWh/day. If left switched on all day, an energy-efficient (11W) light bulb uses (0.011 x 24) = 0.264 kWh/day and a desktop computer using an average of 125W will consume (0.125 x 24) 3 kWh/day. It is not so simple to calculate the power consumption of some appliances just by checking out the wattage since power demands can fluctuate, e.g. fridges use power according to their ‘chill’ setting in relation to the ambient room temperature. Don’t forget that other non-electrical appliances such as stoves or oil burners also need to be included.

Renewable Energy … Renewable-power generating appliances need to be compared to see what they can achieve for you. Roof-mounted micro-wind turbines are probably not very effective in providing for your overall electrical needs. It has been estimated that a “600 W” micro-turbine mounted on a typical roof in England generates only 0.04 kWh per day – about 7 per cent of the power used by an 11 W light bulb.
In contrast, roof-mounted solar water heaters make good sense. Even where the sunlight levels achieve only about 30 per cent, a 3-square-metre panel can supply on average about 3.8 kWh per day (i.e. perhaps half of a typical family’s hot water).

Other technologies are often viewed as ‘less green’, such as heat pumps; but if they drew power solely from renewable sources (i.e. wind farms, etc) then they would be a logical environmental choice. Some of the newer ones can deliver as much as 4.9 kWh of heat in the form of hot air or hot water, using 1kWh of electricity to do so.
A final thought… before paying out money to provide energy, first put into action ways of reducing your power requirements.

Living in the 21st century, many countries are adapting to the new green paradigm, updating old homes and buildings to suit the needs of a healthier environment and home.Energy and sustainability fuel many facets of life. With a growing amount of education and technology in eco-sustainable resources, many countries are leading the way towards a paradigm of green building and construction.

Many old and obsolete methods of insulation are still present in homes and buildings built prior to 1980. Asbestos was highly regarded throughout the 20th century as an ideal building and construction material. It’s fire resistant, durable and versatile quality made it sought out by many industries. Asbestos was used in industrial applications such as insulation, piping, roofing and automobiles.
There are many green, eco-friendly materials that replace the need for asbestos and can reduce energy costs annually. With introduction of the governments Home Energy Scheme not only will you save some money in uprgading the insulation in your house but you will also play an important role in the transformation to a healthier and sustainable world. Implementing green methods of building can have positive environmental, health and economic benefits. These include:
- Conservation of natural resources
- Enhance air quality and protect ecosystems
- Energy sustainability
- Increase property value
- Improve quality of life
- Improvement of pulmonary and cardiac health
- Reduce waste

Asbestos In The Home

In many instances, the best action is no action at all. Disturbing asbestos in good condition may cause its fibers to be released into the air. The inhalation of asbestos fibres can lead to the development of lung ailments such as mesothelioma and asbestosis. Symptoms may not surface until 20 to 50 years after exposure occurs. Mesothelioma will often progress to the later stages of development, resulting in poor mesothelioma prognosis for the majority of patients. Some factors that affect mesothelioma survival rate include age of diagnosis, latency period and cigarette smoking.

If any suspected asbestos is present, the best advice is to leave it alone, as this can break down its fibers to move airborne. Hiring a professional inspector who can determine the validity of danger is a good first step. However, if removal is needed in homes, work places and public facilities, it should be performed by a licensed abatement contractor who is trained in handling toxic materials.

Go Green!

Green insulation alternatives to asbestos include the use of cotton fibre, lcynene foam and cellulose. These recycled building materials have shown to reduce annual energy costs by 25 percent. These green options have the same beneficial qualities as asbestos, minus the health deteriorating and toxic components.  Check out insulation providers near you on the GreenMe directory

Living in a world where environmental sustainability is a vital concern to the future of mankind, it is important to take note of the consequences of improper building materials and environmental degradation. These asbestos alternatives allow for a healthy, safe home, free of health damaging materials.

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