Green house effect

It's Thursday, February 8 and Brussels is covered by a blanket of snow. The temperature gauge reads -2°C and bureaucrats are trying to keep their balance on the icy surface. Even for the Belgian capital, it's cold.

But inside an old townhouse in Rue D'Arlon, huddled among the many modern glass structures in the heart of the EU quarter, it is wonderfully cosy.

Nothing unusual, were it not for the fact that the 120-year-old house generates all of its heating and cooling requirements from renewable energies.

At a time when Europe is desperately trying to cut back on the burning of fossil fuels that could reduce the effect of climate change, it is no wonder many are looking on with great interest at the way this particular building runs.

A dusty green door leads to a large, meticulously restored reception room, which offers warm shelter... and a cup of coffee.

"We are really trying to maximise the use of renewable energies in here," a smiling Christine Lins, secretary general of the European Renewable Energy Council, tells The Times.

The systems used inside the house seem perfectly logical, though in reality the building is nothing less than a laboratory.

Some of the structure's alterations can be easily applied to any house or apartment in Malta. Double glazing keeps out street noise but especially the cold and heat. To prove her point, Ms Lins opens one of the windows and a chill suddenly drafts through the room. The windows around the house are covered in photovoltaic cells, designed to capture energy and draw it into the building.

Rather than electricity or gas, much of the building is heated by tiny brown tubes of compressed sawdust, which are then funnelled into a boiler.

The circumference of a pill and a couple of centimetres long, the tubes are delivered twice a year and poured into pipes at the front of the building. Even the machine that heats up the pellets uses little electricity. And, of course, to make maximum use of the materials, the ash collected from the pellets can then be used as fertiliser.

The rest of the building is heated through four geo-thermal boreholes buried beneath the courtyard.

"Just look up to the ceiling now," Ms Lins instructs, pointing to a vent up above her. "Air will come through that vent and out of that other vent by the fireplace enabling the room to breathe."

The heat produced in the room is then somehow transferred to the building's energy system.

The fluorescent lights hanging above the table give out no heat at all and the energy they consume is channelled solely into light.

A tour around the building shows that most of the space is used creatively to reduce, reuse and recycle. Energy-saving bulbs light up the house and small stickers above each light switch remind you to turn them off every time you leave the room.

Five boxes sit at the end of a corridor to convert the energy from cells into power that can be used around the building. Up on the roof there are panels designed to gather yet more power from the sun.

Due to shading from the neighbouring tall buildings, the "sunlight" solar thermal contribution is low in winter. However, all the "daylight" solar gains in winter will minimise the consumption of wood pellets.

With a hefty surcharge on utility bills and soaring temperatures in summer, Malta would do well to exploit some of the cooling technologies on offer in the energy house.

The core of the cooling system is the Thermally Driven Cooling Machine, rather than the usual air-conditioning units. While conventional cooling machines consume high amounts of electricity, this machine is powered by relatively low temperature heat and low electrical power.

"Installing a solar thermal cooling system in a warm country like Malta is dead easy," Ms Lins points out.

Rearranging the energy needs of a building need not take a lifetime. The 2,000-square-metre house in Rue D'Arlon took just seven months to complete, and that is an old building hampered by design restrictions.

New technology, of course, comes at a cost but Ms Lins insists that the savings will be worth it in the end.

Suffice it to say that some 26 tonnes of pellets for such a large building cost just €5,000 or so. A similar house making use of no renewables will face energy bills of three times as much. And the cost to the environment is ultimately priceless.

This report comes courtesy of the Institute of Maltese Journalists and Air Malta.