In recent months there has been a frenzied growth in the heating of new apartment blocks and housing estates, from a single heat source. This is being driven by the realisation that fossil fuels are finite and rapidly dwindling, by political instability in the energy producing countries, by international fluctuations in energy costs and by our own needs to reduce our carbon footprint. For an increasing number of developers, district heating, often combined with large scale renewables and CHP have emerged as an attractive means of circumventing all of these constraints and uncertainties, whilst also offering an opportunity of delivering a more marketable product. At the same time management companies have evolved to facilitate these projects by fostering new relationships between the energy provider and the consumer, with many now starting to provide tailor-made solutions from the provision of finance, design and build, to the supply of fuel, maintenance and finally billing the client. Thanks to the ESCo model, one school in Donegal has gone green, seen its heating bills reduced by 15% yet has not had to outlay one cent in capital expenditure. John Hearne investigates an emerging trend that is bringing low carbon energy into another realm.

 Size matters. The bigger you get, the greater the available efficiencies. With renewable technologies now mainstream in domestic construction, developers are eyeing up the options for large scale heat and energy production.

Property developer Ronan Meeley made the decision to utilise renewable energy-based district heating for a 67 house development in Moate when he read about district heating in this magazine. He was already a veteran of Sustainable Energy Ireland’s (SEI) House of Tomorrow programme, the scheme for promoting greener practises within the building trade. “It was [Construct Ireland editor] Jeff Colley who put me in touch with the people who’d be the experts in this field. I went up to SEI the same as normal and I got approval for the houses under the House of Tomorrow. I had intended putting in individual pellet boilers, the solar panels and the high level of insulation. The usual. Then I made contact with one of their experts and I worked out that putting in the district heating wouldn’t cost me more than putting in the individual boilers. Then I said yeah, why not?” The advantages, he says, are obvious. “It doesn’t take much working out that one boiler is better than sixty-seven. It was wood pellet boilers I was going to put, they’d be going in sheds out the back, so I don’t have the cost now of putting in the little base or the shed or the individual boiler.” With thirty houses on the estate sold before the possibility of district heating arose, Meeley called a meeting of future residents to see how the idea would go over. “I explained to them that I was delaying closing off these houses because I wanted to put in a district heating system. All but one of the residents were there…They said yeah, we’re all for it. Everybody was very, very positive towards the idea.” Despite the fact that it was an entirely new departure, and the fact that it delayed completion Meeley is still convinced that it’s the way to go. “I’m going to be building around here for a long time. If I get a name for building quality houses, I can always say to them when the market quietens down – which it’s starting to do – I can say to them, go over to Moate, look at those houses, that’s the way I leave an estate, that’s the way I do it. Knock on the door, ask the people living there what they think.”

A Powertech wood chip boiler heats Belfast's Campbell College