POWER GENERATION
Power Generation is extremely important for anyone who has to be, or wishes to be energy independent from the usual grid supply. And since no one source, including the grid itself is entirely reliable, we at Irishpower.ie have combined a number of renewable technologies in a professional manner.
An ideal off grid installation will almost certainly combine wind and solar energy technologies, and store some of the harvested energy in a battery bank, while using the rest. However when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, energy levels in a battery storage system can become swiftly depleted, leaving the home or business owner without electricity or even heat, since all heating systems require some electricity to operate pumps, fans, ignition and control systems etc. Our solution to this power generation problem is to include a high quality, fully automatic electricity generation system which burns natural gas or LPG. This system will only come on line when nature’s alternative sources become scarce. We opted for a gas fired system for a number of reasons, the biggest being ultra reliability, since gas unlike diesel doesn’t gel in cold weather, unlike petrol it won’t gum up a fuel distribution system, and its quality doesn’t deteriorate over time. And just as the other power generation technologies maintained the voltage of the energy storage system, so too does the gas fired generation system when solar or wind may not be available.
Considering that the vast bulk of energy consumed by homes is primarily for heat, we wondered could those heat generation systems not also be used as power generation systems. A solution to this has already been developed by some companies, whereby heat is conventionally generated by burning a fuel in a boiler, and then some of this heat energy is converted to electrical energy for consumption in the home, a very good idea. The Irish Power solution is somewhat more novel, and much more energy efficient. We also burn a fuel, but instead of converting the fuel into 90% heat energy and 10% electrical energy, we first convert it to 80% electrical energy and 20% heat energy. Then, using heat pump technology, we use some of the 80% electrical component to increase its own energy value by a factor of three to four times while being converted to heat energy, (while also recapturing the 20% heat element from the initial fuel combustion process). And because of the uniqueness of this process, varying levels of heat and/or electrical energy can be made available at any time to the home.
