RE Project

[pogster]

Hi All,

I am part of a group that has been set up in our local village (pop 1700) to support "green initiatives". One of the projects we intend to undertake is a renewable energy project in conjunction with the local school (already on board) and to that end a £15k grant is available from our Local Council. This + the Low carbon Buildings grant of 50% gives us £30k to play with so to speak!

I want to get you opinions on the best way forward - it's still early days but we need to decide on a suitable project that will ultimately benefit the school.

Options are really a turbine or a PV system, the school has a large flat roof that is not shaded I am under the opinion we could get a 5-6kWp system for that kind of money? What are your thoughts, who would be the best companies to approach for pricing etc etc..

Any help would be appreciated.

Pete.

[Gary T]

      Don't disregard either Solar Water Heating - with Navitron, you should be able to get around 60kW peak thermal output, or a woodchip fired boiler - if your council has waste wood from the local parks etc available.

[Shay]

The only problem with solar thermal would be that the school will be shut during the optimal solar gain period i.e. summer holidays

[Paulh_Boats]

Pete,

Solar thermal gives you the best value for money. It will save a lot on hot water heating bills.

Turbines: The success of this depends entirely on the average wind speed and how high you can get the turbine. If the school building is surrounded by open playing fields the prospects are good, but if sheltered by high buildings a turbine maybe a waste of time. Note that turbines can get noisy and they need maintenance.
 Your first task is to install an anemometer to record wind speeds over several months. Then a reliable decision can be made based on accurate wind data at your site.

PV is expensive but the technology is simple, silent and reliable with almost no maintenance. Costs may come down, but its educational value to the children is immense in my opinion.

Be careful on pricing and bounce the quotes here for second opinions. There are a lot of rip-off deals out there, cashing in on peoples green intentions.

In which county is the school located? Is it on high ground?

cheers
Paul

[pogster]

Lancashire, It's essentially just at the end of a flat flood plane 6 miles east of Southport. There are no real high buildings around the school but there are some trees.

There are plans to install three large turbines >250kW each on the moss (flood plane) adjacent to our village but there is as you would expect massive opposition locally to this. Whilst a community based turbine would probably get permission (being smaller and involving the community), I would still plumb for a PV installation as it's less visually impacting, needs very little maintanance and silent.

I did phone one company today to get an idea on install costs - we would need to use a registered installer as it's a school and for the Low Carbon Buildings grant. They were quoting £6K per installed kWp which seems quite expensive to me?

I discounted solar thermal as I could not get my head around the waste during the summer break! however as the payback is so short it may be worth looking at??

[PEMTEK]

Hi Pete,

I would seriously consider the solar water heating as even if you worked it out for 6 months of the year (realistically alot more) the holidays arent much really when you consider the payback time in terms of carbon and money.

The argument still rages on about PV and carbon used in manufacture, inverters etc. Life of inverters / panels etc.

Phil

[Ivan]

Depends how adventurous you are feeling. I am hoping to find someone that would like to have a go at an 'interseasonal heat store' - this is where you heat a large store of water in the summer, and then use this for space-heating during the winter. For an average house to be 100% heated with solar, you'd probably be looking at around £10k worth of materials. Not sure what the labour cost would be. For a school it would be proportionally higher, but of course, you could aim to heat the school say 50% using stored solar energy. Any idea how many kWh are used to heat the school over a year?

[Shay]

Its not just summer hols, there is easter, christmas, mid term etc., they all add up. My kids primary school for the older kids finishes at 4 pm, 2 pm for junior infants and 3 pm for senior infants. A grid connected PV or Wind instalation will generate income every day to offset the schools runing costs.

[PEMTEK]

The holidays at christmas and anything relatively close would not matter so much anyway as the solar gain from november to early march is pretty low in the uk especially as you move further north. 

The true payback with the solar hot water system if its installed by a reputable installer would still be good even accounting for unused solar heat during holiday time. As Ivan pointed out if you fancy building a seriously large tank of water as a winter thermal store there could be good winter benefits also.

[billi]

in the end the question is ..... heat or electricity  


the big part anyhow should, will be  that the pupils are included ....into the idea..



Perhaps have   one socket in the school  driven by PV to charge all the mobiles, ipods, scooters  for free

regards billi

[pogster]

Not sure how much hot water the school uses as I think the dinners are made off site, but a split system may be worth concidering i.e. spend 5k on solar thermal and the rest on solar PV.

Ivan, too unconventional at this stage, I'm sure grant money would be awarded more favorably given a tried and tested system. like the idea though!

[KenB]

Pogster,

Has the school got a swimming pool?

For that budget you could suggest a solar heated one, that could be used during the summer hols, and during the rest of the year the solar could contribute to the hot water.

Unfortunately any sensible suggestion like a pool/sports facility would be turned down - on the grounds that it was a source of risk, and the council do all they can to avoid being sued.

Even wind turbines cannot be considered entirely risk free. Did one not recently collapse at a school or was it felled by vandals?

The least risk option would be grid tied solar pV and sell the electricity to the utilities at the best price.



Ken

[billi]

Hi

I am still waiting on a PV driven heatpump design
Since years i read about it , but not much to find  in realworld   

billi

[David]

I am part of a group that has been set up in our local village (pop 1700) to support "green initiatives". One of the projects we intend to undertake is a renewable energy project in conjunction with the local school (already on board) and to that end a £15k grant is available from our Local Council. This + the Low carbon Buildings grant of 50% gives us £30k to play with so to speak!

I want to get you opinions on the best way forward - it's still early days but we need to decide on a suitable project that will ultimately benefit the school.

The answer may well depend on what the group means by benefiting the school. As it is a school I would hope that the benefit would be measured in terms of education, though I gather that this is considered somewhat old fashioned in many schools where a great deal of effort is devoted to money instead.

If education is the aim then I think the best approach is to install a number of renewable systems, so that the children can appreciate how individual forms of generation work and how they can work together. In part how much they can take in depends on their ages, but there is scope for things like monitoring the output and comparing it to the weather and geography.

How well insulated and protected against the sun is the school? Perhaps some of the money should go into this.

[David]

I am hoping to find someone that would like to have a go at an 'interseasonal heat store'

I have never seen a school which looked like it was well enough insulated to really benefit from one of these.