The Eco village in Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary has finally commenced construction.
www.thevillage.ie The plan is to build 130 new houses on the 65 acre site with various communal facilities. One of the shared facilities is district heating. There is to be two large woodchip burners and 500 sq metres of solar panels. The photographs below show the shed for the woodchip boilers from the fuel intake side. The other one is the base for the solar panels. The solar panels are going to be flat panels and there doesn't seem to be a plane to elevate them in winter. There will be hot water storage in each house and storage tanks in the building so presumably there will be timed heat transfers. They are claiming only two percent loss in distribution. The panels only represent 3.8 sq metres per house but since one third of the sites are unsold there will initially be more heat per house. There was a grant of €750,000 for the heating system.
In the longer term electricity generation is being considered but initially electricity will be from a renewable source. Longer term heat storage is being considered and should have had higher priority to even out solar production.
There are a few aspects of the initial buildings that don't look right. The roadways are all hard surface and the main ones use concrete bricks. The other is that the houses, so far, look very conventional don't seem to make proper use of sunlight. There are two kit houses imported from Austria and one block (below) is timber frame with hemp walls.
The project started ten years ago and the site was bought something like five years ago. They seem to have missed the building boom and many prospective buyers may not be able to sell their present houses to fund the build.
