High energy approach to renewable power

DUBLIN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY:THE DUBLIN Energy Lab (DEL) at the Dublin Institute of Technology is a unique energy research centre in terms of the breadth of its work, which takes in everything from energy generation to systems to marketing and policy. "There are a lot of other energy research groups working in Europe at the moment but our big differentiator is our multi-disciplinary nature. We take in everything from the device level up to policy analysis," says centre manager Dr Aidan Duffy.

“We have a very broad range of activities taking in marketing, behavioural analysis of people taking energy purchase decisions, as well as the pure science of energy generation and systems.

“We don’t just look at a wind turbine in isolation, for example – we look at how it interacts with the grid and so on to be useful to society.

“We look at all of the pipework and infrastructure involved in getting the energy to the consumer. And we take our technical knowledge and use it for policy analysis. This really is a unique differentiator.”

Set up in 2005, the DEL comprises seven overlapping research groups: Electrical Power Research Group; Business Society and Sustainability Research Centre; Centre for Research in Engineering Surface Technology; Solar Energy Group; Energy Policy Group; and the National Institute for Transport and Logistics.

Over the past six years, the centre has been responsible for five patents and 16 licences. It has worked with more than 30 different companies and has generated €4 million in research income, over one third of it industry-related.

Since 2006 the group’s energy-related research income has approximately doubled, with current annual average income in the region of €1 million. Industry-related energy research income and numbers of projects delivered have also grown steadily with annual income of about €300,000-€400,000.

Research output as measured by peer-reviewed publications has grown at a similar rate. Between 2005 and 2010, the DEL staff produced more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact international journals and more than 150 publications at international peer-reviewed conferences.

“We can’t cover everything, that would be too difficult, but when we have seminars for our PhDs and post-doc researchers, the topics covered can range from feed-in tariffs to the impact of climate change on our culture along with highly technical stuff,” says Duffy.

This gives the lab a very broad and almost holistic view of energy solutions. The variability of renewable energy sources such as wind is one area of study.

Large-scale storage can be a problem. “One of the areas that we have been looking at is compressed air storage,” says Duffy. “This is far better from an environmental point of view than flooding valleys with sea water.”

Compressed air storage involves the pumping of air into underground storage containers at high pressure for later release when required.

“Because it is underground, people don’t see it and that is a very attractive aspect of this technology,” he says. “We are currently looking at ways of storing the heat generated by the process for later release as part of the electricity generation process.”

DEL is working with a commercial partner that has plans to construct between two and six compressed air facilities around the world, one of them possibly in Ireland.

This close relationship with a commercial partner is characteristic of way the lab and DIT works.

“One step closer to the real world is our ethos here at DIT. We are very focused on developing commercial spinouts from our research and almost everybody researching in the group has a commercial partner,” he says.

“We have a number of technologies available to license, including wind and wave farm power prediction software, energy-efficient data centre cooling systems and integrated switchable mirrors for solar panels. We already have commercial licences with a number of companies based in Ireland including ESB, IBM, Taoglas and Decawave.”

A very different line of research involves transport. “Transport is very important in terms of energy efficiency and emissions,” Duffy says. “There has been an increase of more than 150 per cent in emissions from the transport sector over the past decade.

“There are two ways of dealing with this. One is to develop more energy-efficient vehicles and the other is to use supply chain management and transport logistics techniques to reduce the number of miles travelled. This is one of the areas in which the National Institute of Transport and Logistics is involved.”

While there is a commercial focus to the work of the lab, the research ethos is very much alive and well. “The way we have grown is very much organic,” says Duffy. “And we’re really in favour of that. We don’t start out at the top in a corporate way and say that we are going to develop excellence in a number of very specific areas. Research at third level is very much about people and DEL is about bringing people in disparate fields together to leverage their multi-disciplinary potential.

“I don’t particularly like the phrase, but what we have here is a coalition of the willing. Research always starts with one person with an interest in an area; they attract PhD students and collaborators and eventually you have a cluster. After that you have interactions at the edges to come up with different ways of addressing problems. That’s what we have created at DEL.”

An example of this approach is the work done on micro-generation devices, such as domestic wind turbines and solar panels, being carried out at DEL.

“In the past, research always looked at the performance of micro-generation devices. However, we also looked at the behaviour of consumers and discovered that people don’t make decisions to purchase them on the basis of logical net present value. This was a bit shocking for engineers.

“We found that about 50 per cent of people say they will never buy the technology regardless of what happens. They are simply rejecters. Another 42 per cent say they will buy at some stage in the future. And another 8 per cent say they will buy within the next year. But our studies have shown this will turn out to be only 3 per cent. This is interesting information and we want to find out why people will buy and why they won’t as well as who these people are.

“After that we can run technical models to see where micro-generation will deliver the best economic performance and bring the two pieces of research together to bring on the next generation of buyers.”

In the area of energy policy, DEL has looked at the issue of whether Ireland is better off subsidising renewables in the short term or focusing on energy efficiency. “Does it make more sense to install double glazing or put in solar panels?” he says. “For the time being, it might be better to go for energy efficiency measures than micro-generation.”

In the future, the electricity generated by solar panels will cost the same as that which comes from the grid, he says. “We will have to have the infrastructure in place to cater for that when the time comes. We will need technologies, such as smart metering and energy storage capacity, and we have to start putting these in place now.”

This is just a very small selection of the research projects being undertaken at the DEL. For further information see dit.ie/dublinenergylab/