ALTERNATIVE ENERGY
SOURCES? NIBE SAYS WE CAN LEARN FROM SWEDEN
Phil Hurley, Managing Director of NIBE Energy Systems Ltd., suggests that the UK has much to learn from the Swedish experience.
The energy revolution that is only just beginning in UK as escalating fuel costs allied to the need for environmental awareness become matters of genuine public concern, was by and large experienced in Sweden in the 1970s. Despite Sweden’s enormous HEP potential, the country was at that time heavily dependent on oil for the heating that is so essential in a Scandinavian winter. So when oil supplies were threatened, prices rocketed and the search for energy alternatives was on. One consequence was a massive switch to underfloor heating since it requires lower operating temperatures than radiator systems. This in turn logically led on to the introduction of heat pumps working at vastly greater efficiency than the old oil fired boiler. Our parent company is based in Markaryd and installed the first exhaust air heat pumps in Sweden in 1980. Today oil boilers are virtually extinct, NIBE Heating is the largest heat pump manufacturer in Europe and in Sweden today 90% of new homes have heat pumps installed.
When alternative energy sources are discussed in the UK [it could be in the press, the pub or parliament], wind power is the most likely source to be proposed regardless of whether it is on a domestic or national scale. It is then that I point to the Swedish example as the way forward, for experience there has shown that heat recovered from the ground, from exhaust ventilation or from the air can be both practical and affordable in domestic, commercial and industrial situations. If these methods can work in the extremes of the Swedish climate, they will certainly do so in the milder weather in this country.
|56| ENVIRONMENT INDUSTRY MAGAZINE
Geothermal heat has been used very successfully in volcanic areas for many years and also [mainly experimentally] using very deep probes to harness the Earth’s core heat. However it is only recently that it has been exploited on a domestic scale. The heat pump works by utilising the heat from sunlight that remains stored in the ground, either by use of a collector buried around one metre deep or by deeper vertically sunk probes. Compared with the conventional use of fossil fuels, the energy required to keep a house warm and the water hot can be reduced by up to 75% since a heat pump can convert one kilowatt of received energy into five kilowatts of heat. NIBE supplies pumps with capacities from five to forty kilowatts and higher wattage can be achieved by in-line linkage.
For some years a major force in energy conservation, especially in offices, was the creation of what was virtually a sealed unit through insulation and draught prevention. Though energy efficient, the results varied from mildly unpleasant to downright unhealthy, with condensation in many cases an unwanted by-product. We have since come to realise that air replacement through ventilation is essential for comfortable living and, fortunately, the vast majority of the heat that would otherwise be lost to the outside atmosphere can now be recovered by use of an Exhaust Air Heat Pump. Our NIBE pump units are roughly the size of a fridge/ freezer and recycle so much energy from the exhaust gas that the emissions into the outside atmosphere are at a temperature close to zero degrees. They have
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