Scouting Ireland is one of Ireland's largest voluntary educational youth movements that has over 53,000 members. It was founded in 2004 and has the primary aim of encouraging young people to develop a broad variety of skill sets for their future.
Action Renewables was engaged by Scouting Ireland in 2018 to produce an Energy Master Plan (EMP) and Register of Opportunities. This project involved conducting detailed energy audits in five residential centres. The aim of these audits was to evaluate the baseline energy performance of each centre and to make recommendations for energy efficiency measures and renewable energy systems in order to reduce the organisation's reliance on fossil fuels and become more energy efficient.
Through site visits and consultation with various staff representatives, our consultancy team established the current energy usage, activities and occupancy patterns and evaluated energy policies, practices and equipment. For each building we looked at the current space heating systems - age, performance, fuel types, in addition to hot water preparation, ventilation and air conditioning, electrical appliances and lighting. The buildings ranged from a modern facility built in 2012 to a former boarding school dating from the 1840s. As with any of our energy audit reports, our team identified the low/no-cost areas for immediate improvement in addition to areas of good practice, which could be replicated on other sites.
The purpose of the Scouting Ireland Energy Master Plan was to quantify the current energy status of the SEC through a baseline of electrical and thermal energy use. The format of this baseline allows the organisation to periodically update their energy status in order to track progress against their energy targets in future. The Energy Master Plan enables the community (in this case the Scouting Ireland organisation) to prioritise the best energy projects to start with and identify grants and supports to help achieve these.
Detailed feasibility studies were completed for each property on the installation, management, benefits and costs of a range of renewable energy technologies where appropriate, including; solar PV, wind generation, solar thermal, heat pumps and biomass heating systems. Our team produced a report for each residential centre detailing the outcomes of the audits and feasibility studies including economic analysis, carbon savings, technical analysis and recommendations. Our reports provided the client with economic and environmental business cases to enable informed decisions on whether renewable energy projects would be feasible.
A list of potential energy efficiency and renewable energy projects were compiled for each centre. These ranged from lighting replacements, heating control upgrades and building insulation upgrades to sub-metering, energy tariff reviews and installation of renewable technologies. The registers included annual energy, CO2 and cost savings in addition to capital cost and payback. The SEC was then able to apply ranking criteria based on e.g. kWh saved, CO2 reductions, target demographics or social impact and allowed the organisation to select the most suitable energy projects which they could achieve over the following 3 years.
Action Renewables identified a total of 81,000kWh/year of energy savings through implementing energy efficiency measures. This equates to €11,800 per year and 41,000kgs of CO2 emissions.
Our team has extensive experience in renewable energy feasibility, having completed over 200 feasibility studies for various technologies including wind turbines, solar PV, biomass, solar thermal, hydroelectric and combined heat and power CHP). We also have extensive experience of working with community groups and have been a partner in 13 EU funded projects, including three where Action Renewable was a lead partner. These projects have seen Action Renewables work alongside a wide range of organisations including, education providers, community groups, local government and non-governmental organisations from multiple countries.
If you would like to know more about our energy auditing and feasibility study services, click below to contact our team.
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Action Renewables helped us to fully understand the problems and solutions to future strategies. Their expertise was invaluable in providing clear information and guidance
Scouting Ireland
