Project lead: Glasgow City Council
Local Energy Challenge Fund award amount: £20,000
Area: Glasgow City
Vision
The vision for the project is to install a graphene infrared heating system, solar PV, and a hot water system with control panels to reduce energy loss and fuel poverty. The project aims to demonstrate how savings can be made (both in fuel costs and carbon emissions) from the installation of the graphene system and evaluate its potential as a solution to high energy costs in stone tenement buildings and off gas areas.
Project
The proposed system uses graphene as a heating element. It works by using the high surface area of graphene as an infrared emitter and therefore does not need to generate hot surface temperatures in order to work.
The hot water system uses the graphene nano platelets based ink technology to provide energy efficient hot water production and by maximising the surface area in contact with the hot water tank this can help to lower the energy requirement.
The graphene wall paper is based on the reflective microspheres used by NASA for insulating the Space Shuttle and, at just 1mm thick, it rolls on walls similar to lining paper and households can paint over it. It acts as an insulator by reflecting heat back into the room with a proportion of it also being used to heat up the walls.
If successful, this delivery model could be applied across a larger number of tenement areas in the Glasgow area.