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| Part L Revealed |
Since the announcement last September by the Minister for the Environment of substantial improvements to be made under Part L of the Building Regulations, speculation has been rife in the construction industry about what the details of the updated regulations would entail. Jeff Colley examines some of the key parts of a regulatory improvement that will help the Irish construction industry to modernise and meet the demands of a rapidly changing world.
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Official magazine of Easca  |
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Renewable Energy
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Page 4 of 7
Larry Staudt stands in front of the wind turbine at DKIT’s Centre for Renewable Energy
Ireland will have to take whatever meters are in current production for the the pilot programme as that starts so soon. However, since re-metering the whole country will cost perhaps e600 million, not only is getting the right design very important, but the market is big enough for firms to produce what we want. Such meters may not be available yet since only a few parts of the world – Italy, Sweden, California, the Netherlands, Ontario, and Australia – have installed smart meters on any scale and none of those which have possess Ireland's wind energy potential. A Bristol smart meter manufacturer, Horstmann, was unable to tell me of any firm which makes meters with a load management system that the domestic consumer could control.
Apart from the import/export capability, which will allow anyone with their own generating equipment to sell power to the grid, and the “desirable” in-home display unit, all the features mentioned in the invitation to tender benefit the electricity supplier rather than the customer. For example, besides getting a price that always covers their costs, suppliers will no longer have to send out meter readers and will be able to disconnect their customers, or limit the amount of power they can draw, at will. The new meters will also be able to report on the quality of the supply, the state of the network and whether the customer has attached unapproved generating equipment. The suppliers' cash-flow will improve too as they will be able to require customers to pay in advance by topping up their meters in the way they top-up their mobile phones.
What the customer may not get is a way to respond automatically to changes in the price of power. The in-home display unit will tell him or her the price of electricity at any given moment but it could be left to them to respond to that information by going round the house turning heaters and appliances on and off. This won't work well even in the most conscientious household as the family will be either absent or asleep for much of the week.
What's needed is a computer-based programmable system so that, if the wind blows strongly and the power falls below a price-point the customer has pre-set, the immersion heater or the washing machine is automatically turned on, the chest-freezer is given a blast, the ground-source heat pump starts to run and the electric car's battery goes on charge. Equally, if ever the price of power rose over a certain level, only lights and electronic equipment would stay on. Such a system would not only lop the tops off the peaks in electricity demand and fill in most of the troughs but would provide a market for increasing amounts of wind-electricity which Ireland will otherwise have in surplus supply.
Smart meters are essential for achieving another goal in the Programme for Government: “the introduction of net metering to allow consumers to sell electricity back into the grid from any renewable power supplies they have.” I understand the plan is that anyone feeding electricity into the grid through their meter will be paid whatever price they would have to pay at that moment if they were drawing power out. “The problem with old-style net metering was that someone could draw power from the grid at a peak period and then offset this by putting power back at a time of low demand” John Quinn comments. “That could even increase Ireland's carbon emissions.”
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Issue 11, Vol 4 Out Now
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