Solar cooling experiment to be moved to Germany

An engineer who built an oil rig in Turkey operating on wind and solar energy wanted to experiment with a house cooled solely by solar energy in Malta. It would have been a "world prototype".

But after two years of preparations and being kept on hold, engineer Norman Abela's application was turned down by the Malta Environment and Planning Authority and he has now decided to take the project to Germany.

The application for an outline development permit was submitted to Mepa in July 2003. A few days ago, the authority unanimously turned it down.

What Mr Abela was planning to do was to transform and use for his experiments a dilapidated building just outside the area indicated as the Fort Campbell in the northwest local plan, turning it into an institute for renewable energy, involving an investment of Lm100,000. The building was once an officer's mess.

His plans were to fund the institute through revenue streams generated from training courses, inward investment and EU funds provided specifically for such research.

Mr Abela said that the institute would have served a number of functions:

¤ It would have housed research in the field of renewable energy with particular emphasis on solar cooling;

¤ It would have provided specialised training to engineers and technicians working on projects of renewable energy; and

¤ It would have been used to monitor, by appropriate sensors, model rooms for the data logging of solar and wind, insulation performance, load requirements and energy generated.

This data would have then been analysed to derive performance standards to be applied in the building industry.

The plan had been for laboratory spaces to consist of test rooms where the generation of heat loads according to different usages, such as living, sleeping and cooking, were emulated and the performances of the cooling systems assessed.

Monitoring would have been controlled by computers and the data generated analysed to get to a guideline for best practice.

The laboratories would have also served as models, for adoption throughout the country, of how innovative features researched at the institute could be widely applied both in new buildings or retrofit projects.

But when considering the application, Mepa board members argued that "test" rooms were still being labelled as cooking, sleeping and living, indicating a residential use.

Mr Abela argued that if the experiments were to eventually be moved to residential buildings, he had to research how they would perform in a house. But this did not in any way mean that he intended to live at the institute. In fact, he had no intention of doing so whatsoever.

But Mepa had then argued that if the experiments were meant to show the results of research carried out in a common house, there was no reason for the developer to insist on the site in question.

Mr Abela argued that the site provided exposure to solar access and wind and the proposed development would have made only a limited impact on the landscape.

The building, he said, had also been chosen because it was distant from the national electric grid, making it independent, as well as being far away from built-up areas in order to avoid distortion of the wind profile. And as it was derelict, its rehabilitation would have been a spin-off.

The Development Control Commission had proposed a refusal of the project pointing out that it would lead to the parcelling of Fort Campbell into unrelated activities and would adversely affect its historical context. It said that as the proposal entailed the setting up of various solar thermal panels, it would have a significant and cumulative visual impact on the characteristics of the rural area and the historical context of Fort Campbell.

It said that although the concept of the proposed institute was acceptable, the proposed site was inappropriate.

Mr Abela said the project he proposed was actually outside the fort and its environs. He had chosen it because it was situated on a ridge, perfect for data collection regarding wind energy. The area was also one of the most wind positive sites in Malta.

The bulk of experiments, however, would have been related to solar energy - researching a solar cooling technology through which one would be able to air condition a house with the heat of the sun. This, Mr Abela said, would have been ideal for Malta and it was an area where no breakthrough had as yet been made.

Mr Abela has been working on alternative sources of energy for the past 10 years. He has conducted various projects both in Malta and abroad.

His projects in Malta include solar garden lights at Mosta Garden, solar telephone boxes at Birzebbuga and in Ramla and a house run on solar energy at Wardija.

His projects abroad include an oilrig in the Sea of Marmara in Turkey. The rig has now been operational for the past five years and no problems have, been encountered.

Making the rig solar cost around Lm30,000. Passing the required cable to have it connected to the energy grid would have cost Lm100,000. This project delivers 10kW of photovoltaic energy and 3kW of wind energy.

He said that the success behind such projects required the training of a number of people and he would have the institute for this purpose bringing over a good number of people to Malta.

Mr Abela shall not be appealing Mepa's decision but will be going into partnership with a German company and conduct his experiments in Germany instead of in Malta.

He said in an interview that he had already spent too much time and money on the project and was not willing to waste more.

"I'll forget about it. It's a big pity but it is the best thing to do in the circumstances," he said.

He said he was completely disgusted at the refusal of the proposal, since, he claimed, no solid reasons had been given.

The European Union guides member states to adopt individual national indicative targets towards the global aim of providing 12 per cent of gross domestic energy requirements from renewable sources by 2010.

Malta's target has been set by the government at five per cent of energy consumption coming from renewable sources, by this date.