An Irish social enterprise that offers fuel-poor households free hot water thanks to surplus electricity from wind is poised for a major expansion across the Republic of Ireland and the UK this year.
uses excess wind power to heat hot water tanks overnight for residents in social housing.
After a successful 10-month pilot of 40 homes in 2022, the scheme will be rolled out to 10,000 households in the Republic of Ireland this year in partnership with Cl煤id Housing, an Irish housing charity.
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鈥淚t鈥檚 looking at the social housing sector, at people who are in poverty, and thinking 鈥榟ow can they become the heart of the energy transition鈥�,鈥� says EnergyCloud founder Derek Roddy.
A trial of 300 homes in Northern Ireland is also scheduled to begin this year and work is under way to set up similar pilots across Scotland, England and Wales.
Under the scheme, a household鈥檚 hot water tank is fitted with a digital switch that allows EnergyCloud to remotely switch on its immersion heater whenever there is surplus wind power on the grid.
It has struck agreements with power suppliers, cable owners and grid operators to allow excess power to be used by those homes for free, instead of wind turbines being powered down.
Participating households receive an alert the evening before, informing them that free hot water will be provided overnight, ready for use in the morning.
The system prevents renewable electricity from going to waste, reduces gas use and saves households about 拢1 for each tank of free hot water they receive.
鈥淚t is quite a simple solution with very few downsides,鈥� says Jon Ferris at energy consultancy LCP Delta.
Growing surplus
As electricity grids tilt increasingly towards renewable energy, grid operators are struggling to know what to do with surplus power.
In 2020 and 2021, enough renewable power to supply 800,000 homes went to waste in the UK as the supply of green power outstripped demand, according to energy company Drax.
By the end of the decade, new offshore wind farms built in the UK could mean that the supply of low-carbon wind, solar and nuclear power outstrips demand 53 per cent of the time.
鈥淭owards the end of this decade, the scale [of growth] in offshore wind is going to be really dramatic,鈥� says at the University of Birmingham, UK. 鈥淪o there will be massive amounts of power that鈥檚 being generated and there will be times when it exceeds the demand.鈥�
Interconnectors and grid-scale energy storage will help to ease the problem, but experts agree that demand from households and businesses will have to become more responsive to weather-dependent generation patterns.
This might mean installing smart electric vehicle chargers that switch on when power is plentiful, or heat pumps kitted out with thermal stores so they can run overnight.
鈥淲e鈥檝e lost that concept of storing in the home, which is, actually, something that we might need to return to,鈥� says Radcliffe.
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