PRI Goes To School In Northern Ireland

This innovative project has seen the installation of photovoltaic solar panels to convert sunlight into electricity and renewable energy streetlights in forty educational establishments across rural Northern Ireland.

For several years NIEE has worked on an ad hoc basis with the five Northern Ireland Education and Library Boards in installing renewable energy systems at schools throughout the region.

Supported with European funding, a programme approach evolved for achieving a thriving, sustainable rural community in Northern Ireland via increased awareness of photovoltaic (PV) technology.

The award-winning Switched on Schools project made this possible and enabled schools to appreciate how valuable energy is as a resource and how energy bills and CO2 emissions can be reduced.

Spreading the carbon footprint reduction message to families and friends, pupils gained an understanding about renewable energy and monitoring online their solar power system.
A web site utilising actual generation data from each school created a ‘power station’.

NIEE programme system PRI supplied the energy data services for remote collection, analysis and billing from the Spring XP and GSM top hat meter in each school involved.

Company sales and marketing manager Geoff Chapman explains:
“Our meter and energy data service solution records the amount of energy used in each school and provides historical data for trend analysis.
Significantly, this information is relayed to a central point for monitoring and interpretation.”

Data is collected and monitored from the customer’s equipment.

Received data is presented in a pre-determined format appropriate to customer needs.
Installation across the forty schools enabled them to claim money from the Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROC) system for the renewable energy produced.

The NIEE generation tariff offers rewards for electricity exported back to the grid and ROCS. Acting on each school’s behalf, annually NIEE submits generation meter readings to Ofgem.