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Grant Aid applications

If you want to save energy in your home, you can apply for a grant through the Low Carbon Buildings Programme(LCBP). This scheme offers grants of up to £2,500 per property towards the cost of installing an approved renewable energy technology by a certified installer.

Renewable energy technologies include things like:

• Solar panels - to produce hot water or electricity from the sun;
• Wind turbines - aerodynamic blades turned by the wind to create electricity;
• Biomass (or bioenergy) - fuel produced from organic materials such as plants or industrial, domestic or agricultural products;
• Ground source heat pumps - which transfer heat from the ground into a building.

These effective alternatives to fossil fuels will help you meet your own energy requirements and reduce your home's carbon dioxide emissions.

For more information about the grant streams and eligbility criteria or to find out about other energy savings grants and offers, contact the Energy Saving Trust advice centre free on 0800 512 012 or go to www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/northernireland

Coleraine Chronicle

A Coleraine company is raising the temperature across the UK with its new heating system which relies solely on background soil temperatures instead of costly fossil fuels.

Transen Sustainable Energy Systems Ltd, based at the Loughanhill industrial estate, is another example of a North Coast company achieving business success beyond its home base.

Bryan Law, Transen's project director advised: "The best to keep a house warm is to insulate it to a very high standard and retain the heat. We take low grade heat from the earth or groundwater and use it for heating and/or cooling purposes without any fossil fuels requirements."

With home heating oil costing about £330 for 500 litres, and prices predicted to rise in the next 18 months, householders will need to re-evaluate how in future they manage their domestic energy budgets.
In the last two months the Transen project director said: "We installed ground heating systems at the Box End Park at Milton Keynes. The system provides a space heating/cooling and domestic hot water system throughout the complex.The heat collected comes from an aquifer 20 metres below ground level."


"A system for a 400m2 private house has been installed in Lanarkshire. The heat is collected from a series of bore holes.
Our heat pumps make use of the more moderate and constant temperatures of the earth to bring internal ambient temperatures to a level of comfort more efficiently, and less expensively, than is possible through conventional heating and air conditioning technologies.