Ireland's climate no barrier to solar power

THE Irish climate is well suited to the harnessing of solar energy for domestic use, but there is a huge "information gap" to be overcome before this is achieved on a meaningful scale, a seminar in Dublin has heard.

The event, organised by the Sustainable New Housing in Ireland (SNHI) initiative, was told that while Ireland gets only about half the sunlight of southern Europe, it is still possible to make major savings on energy bills from the concentration of solar, power.

The seminar brought Ireland and the Republic, including social housing experts from both governments. It also agreed to the establishment of a broader, North South association to enlist the membership of building developers and lending agencies.

The new association, which may be based in one of the Republic's border counties, would in turn target available EU funding to make sustainable housing a practical reality.

Prof Owen Lewis of UCD told those attending that, despite common perceptions, Ireland enjoyed a very temperate climate which offered "quite reasonable conditions" for the harnessing of solar power. But he admitted that the more radical attempts at environmentally friendly building were often unacceptable" because all other design issues had been forgotten in the process.

A recent social housing scheme in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, was an example of sustainable development which was also aesthetically acceptable, he said. These houses were designed so that all the main rooms faced south, and glazed two storey "sunspaces" trapped sunlight for heating the houses.

Ecological housing designs had "gone off the tracks" in the past, he said, but more sophisticated and at the same time more practical architecture was now showing the way forward.

Prof Brian Norton of the University of Ulster said that the use of solar power in heating water was a "mature technology" whose only problem was that a market had not yet been created for it.

He said the notion that our climate was unsuitable for the use of solar power was exposed by the fact that Austria, and not the countries of southern Europe, was leading the way in the use of the technology.

The director of SNHI, Mr Andrew Frew, said the initiative was being organised on an all Ireland basis because both parts of the island shared the common problems of fuel poverty arising from high energy bills, and from high winter mortality among those most vulnerable to cold weather.

Carbon taxation is likely to be a major factor in the coming years," he said. "Global warming is here, but it won't necessarily make Ireland warmer. In fact, if we lose the Gulf Stream, it could work the opposite way.