Hillam News Sustainability Article

The past 6 months have provided a lot of learning for us on our journey to Carbon Neutrality or Net Zero. First the successes.

Following on from the news that the school was about to install solar panels, we can now have a picture of them installed and we can confirm that they are generating and helping to meet the school’s demand.

This is great news ‘cos as we are learning about the impact of the Air Source Pump on electricity consumption – we know that every little bit of sustainable energy which can be generated, along with adopting energy saving techniques, particularly related to Heat will be critical in the future. First indications of the amount of Solar power which the school is generated is that it is mirroring the Community Centre output albeit greater. This is because whilst both are predominantly south facing there are more panels installed at the School.

The Community Association has also installed a 2nd 10kwh electricity storage battery. Unfortunately, during the dark and dreary months of winter, both our batteries were stood idle, but since the weather has brightened and the sun has come out both are being very useful in helping to balance our generation with demand.

We have continued to install a range of energy saving devices. Most of this work is now completed but some devices need tweaking.

As mentioned elsewhere in the News, the Air Source Heat pump installation has worked out well once we became familiar with the new equipment. Our fear about the removal of the gas heating system and being reliant on the ASHP was that the CC would not be warm enough for users. This was reinforced by some Users, who also feared, on the basis on the talk in the press about heat pump performance, not being warm enough as well.

In late autumn there were some rapid falls in temperature and steep fluctuations. Fortunately, we have records of internal temperatures from 2022 and winter 2023 for the Main Hall to use for comparison. The outcome is that the ASHP has produced enough heat even when the outside temperature has dropped to minus 12 this winter. Overall, the CC rooms have been warmer than the previous autumn, winter and spring.

Initial examination of the amount of electricity we have used appears to indicate that we are using around the amount we should be to meet the specified ASHP energy coefficient of around 1:3. That means 1 unit of electricity produces 3 units of heat output. However, we have used a lot more electricity but obviously no gas.

We have two things to work out, have we used too much electricity and has our overall energy costs increased beyond what we should have expected given seasonal and year on year variations. When we done this analysis, we will share our findings.

This further analytical work will be important as it seems that the hope that Hydrogen will be a good substitute for natural gas has receded in the past few months. At this stage electrical heating systems may be the only clean form of sustainable heating for most people in the future.