You may remember John Gilliland who lives up outside Derry, and not only produces enough electricity to service his farm of 650 acres by growing 110 acres of willows (he crops a third each year) but also can sell on electricity to the official grid. The question was asked: is anyone operating such a scheme on this, southern, side of the Border? Well, a letter came from Jim Martin of Terenure, Dublin, who retired from Bord na Mona in 1978 and moved to Rwanda and Burundi under UN auspices to develop sod peat. While in Rwanda he came across papyrus reeds "4 metres high, in enormous quantities" and built a small factory to produce fuel briquettes to use in homes, restaurants, etc. as a substitute for charcoal - for trees were scarce and precious. These two local fuels were developed with aid from the Department of Foreign Affairs. The papyrus reeds were chipped very small.
In 1990 he wrote a description for the Renewable Energy Division of the Department of Energy in Dublin on how to use the cutaway bogs to provide five-year cycle trees (deciduous preferably) - or Short Rotation Forestry - which can be chipped to acceptable size and later used either for briquette production or for electrical generation. All existing machines for production of milled peat, he writes, can easily be modified for this Short Rotation Forestry operation. Annual production, he believes, would be on a more regular basis than milled peat, which depends so much on the variable amount of drying each summer. Unsaleable Coillte thinnings could be used if economical.
He believes that three of the existing ESB generating stations and the three existing B na M briquetting factories (he was writing on September 12th) could be kept in operation ad infinitum. The chipped wood could also be mixed with milled peat for either briquette or electricity production. In the years since 1950, he writes, there have been at least three small chipped wood briquette factories operating here: one in Carlow, one in Kilkenny and one in Co Cavan.
The same equipment can be used, he says, for dried reeds, when chipped. Chipped reeds or wood would be fed directly, rather than as costly briquettes, to the boiler for steam-raising for a turbine, or for gasification in briquette form for diesel engine operation - as was done here during the war for lorry propulsion. Y
