The Green Building

RG323843 • May 14, 2020

Urban sustainablity

The Green Building in Temple Bar was built in 1994 and illustrates how environmentally friendly buildings can help to achieve sustainable urban areas. It includes 8 carefully designed apartments, a ground floor retail space and a basement office floor. The building was designed to minimise undesirable heat gains and losses and to maximise the use of solar energy both directly in the form of heat and light and indirectly by using sun, wind, bedrock energy and stack and canyon effects. Intake of cold air during the heating season is minimised by the use of foliant species to recondition internal air. Cooling is aided by the suppression of core temperatures at night both by enhanced upward radiant losses and "canyon" convection effects. Roof mounted wind turbines and PV panels provide electricity for lighting. Evacuated tube solar collectors provide energy for hot water systems and a heat pump is used to heat the building in winter by extracting low grade energy from the underlying bedrock.

In 1995, the Green Building won the RIAI regional award for Dublin and it also became the first ever EN50438 (Irish settings) compliant grid connected PV system in June 2006.

The Green Building has an A energy rating, contributing to the ESB grid. Since completion the project has been extensively published in Ireland and Europe and has come to be regarded as a key development in the evolution of sustainable building design.

Green Building in Temple Bar is showing alarming heating of bedrock under Dublin

The temperature of the limestone bedrock deep under Dublin has risen dramatically since the borehole for the Green Building in Temple Bar was first tested 28 years ago.

The temperature of this bedrock is checked from time to time by Tim Cooper as part of his on-going monitoring of the performance of the building. The most recent readings, taken on 13 August 2021, showed that the temperature of the bedrock has risen by 2.5°C in the last 28 years.

(These temperature readings were taken using the same two temperature sensors on 9 September 1993 and 13 August 2021. Both sensors gave readings that were within 0.1°C of each other (see readings below), so there is no reason to suspect that they are inaccurate).


Borehole flow and return temperatures



This astonishing data suggests that the entire planet, not just the atmosphere, is heating up dramatically. The only cause for this heating that we can think of is global warming, which was flagged dramatically in the slides presented by Tim Cooper at the launch of the Green Building on 14th September 1994 – see below.



Slides from lecture given by Tim Cooper in 1994



Green dining

by RG323843 • 06 Sept, 2021
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A STORAGE COOKER THAT COULD BECOME THE HEART OF YOUR HOME

Carrigbeg

by A Rooney • 27 Aug, 2020
Carrigbeg is a detached house in Dun Laoghaire built in 2009 with eight 160Wp Solarfun Monocrystalline PV modules on a south facing roof with a slope of c.35°. The DC output from the PV modules is converted into AC electricity by a Fronius IG15 inverter. The AC supply from the inverter is connected to the main household AC circuit. A MyEnergi Eddi controller diverts surplus PV output to a 3kW immersion heater in the HW tank. The house, which is occupied by two adults, is heated by a condensing gas boiler. Monthly energy consumption in Carrigbeg has been recorded since the Eddi controller was installed in February 2019. The resulting data set is summarised below;

Cove Mews

by RG323843 • 14 May, 2020
The Passive House Plus standard when applied to this house indicated that the capacity of the PV array must be c.8.16 kWp at minimum. This was achieved using 24 LG 340Wp solar PV panels oriented East-West at a slope of 10°. The annual output from these PV panels, calculated using PVGIS, is 6,612 kWh. The total energy demand of the house (which is largely used for hot water and non-space heating appliances), calculated using 5-minute operating schedules for all electrical equipment and appliances, is 6,907 kWh.
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