My name is Micheál Walsh and I’m a new member of Cultivate Celbridge. I live in Maynooth and am interested in looking at options for a community energy project in the Maynooth/ Celbridge area. At the moment I am researching the feasibility of the project and weighing up the pros and cons.
Before the summer I went down to the Ballytobin Camphill Community to look at their biogas harvesting system and burners. My conclusion coming away from that visit was that building a biodigester would be a very labour and capital intensive project and would be too big an undertaking without there being serious commitment from a large group of people. However, that’s not to rule it out completely as a possibility..
I have recently been in talks with some people in the social enterprise arena (Ross Rabette, Biabox, and Rónán Ó Dálaigh, SEDCo) about energy co-ops more generally. Their idea is to do some research into different possibilities for co-operative energy projects which could then be used as a starting point for community groups such as ourselves who are interested in doing something in the area of energy.
The three projects which we are looking at currently are wind based on the Drumlin Wind Energy Co-Op in Northern Ireland, some sort of project in the area of water conservation, and a biomass heating project. I am to make an approach to Drumlin Energy Co-op to try to get some information on their business model.
I’m going to proceed with making some tentative inquiries of Drumlin co-op on behalf of Cultivate Celbridge with a view to researching whether a wind project is in any way realistic for us, and then I can feed this back to the group at the next meeting along with the details of the biodigester visit – all with a view to improving our understanding of the options at our disposal for an energy project.
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