Green power installer Belios are hoping to make the Greek island of Antiparos generator-free, one installation at a time.

The islands largest generator-free installation system to date has been installed in a stunning new house built on the island for Craig Cohon – ex blue chip global brand manager.

Craig is the founder of walk it back – a collective working to connect individuals and organisations united by the urgent need to find ways of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

To highlight the crisis, Craig spent six months last year walking from London to Istanbul! – a distance of 4,250km – meeting city leaders, policy makers, CEOs, academics and activists …raising awareness and encouraging collaboration.

Speaking before the walk Craig’s son Jonas said: It’s a massive undertaking-  especially at his age. I hope his body doesn’t decompose on the way there.

Let’s take a look at the low carbon footprint home Craig has just built on the beautiful island of Antiparos, Greece.

Antiparos boasts Europe’s oldest stalactite, at 45m years. Accordingly construction and project management specialist Parostec design modern architecture which is inspired by the areas’ heritage and the built-environment for which Greece is famous.

Craig asked them to design a ‘green’ house. The result is a stunning, uncluttered minimalist hillside home which can run independent of the grid despite boasting a powerful A/C and an electric vehicle charging point.

Construction took two years and the property includes a rainwater harvest system.

The grid power supply on Antiparos is not always reliable at peak times – on hot summer afternoons most Air Conditioning units will be switched on, putting strain on the grid. But the sun is reliable, and so is the PV power it can generate.

The three-phase Energy Storage System in Craig’s house was installed by Belios who specialise in Solar, Off-grid and Energy Storage Systems (ESS). Vangelis Beligiannis, Mechanical Engineer at Belios is proud of what has been achieved and says:

The difficult thing with the construction among the Greek islands is to integrate solar panels into the building scheme without changing the traditional character of the house – for which their visibility has to be reduced as much as possible. So in this house the solar panels are not visible from within the house or pool area. This is a very big achievement. We’re proud to have installed the first ESS with full backup capability on the island of both Antiparos and Paros at this power scale. Contractors and designers usually install a huge back up generator in case of grid failure – but things are changing and systems like this will be more popular in the future.

The next greatest challenge was to make the house in Antiparos capable of supporting all loads with a solar back-up system – without using a generator. For years, new house construction on the island have had a generator back-up and this was not the best solution. Nobody can enjoy a seaview with a generator working… this system is the first in Antiparos to support a such a big house without a generator.

The house is equipped with a three-phase ESS system which powers the air conditioning, EV charger, water pumps, the hot water heat-pumps and all other house appliances.

• Three Victron MultiPlus II 48/15000 each rated at 15kVA and configured for 3-phase supply are AC coupled to a Fronius Symo 20.0-3-M 20kW inverter.
• Thirty-four Longi 575W solar panels provide almost 20kWp.
• A smaller 1100W solar array is controlled by a SmartSolar MPPT 150/35 In the event  of an extended grid failure which takes the batteries all the way to a low-voltage shutdown, this smaller array provides the safety net to wake them up again with no grid and no generator required.
• The battery system consists of four BYD LVS 16.0 towers giving a total of 64kWh capacity.
• The system’s communication centre is a Cerbo GX which sends data through MODBUS to the control centre of the house. It also provides real-time data, history and system programming access to an on-site user interface – a GX Touch 70 – and also provides communication access from anywhere in the world via Victron Energy’s free-to-use platform VRM (Victron Remote Management) enabling monitoring and engineering access.

There is no backup generator.

The biggest power-consuming devices are the Variable Refrigerant Volume air condition units which can demand up to 15kW. There’s also a 22 kW electric vehicle charging station.

The house is used as a summer residence accommodating between 4 to 12 guests.

Belios has been installing solar energy systems since 2010. In recent years their work has increasingly turned toward the ESS and Off-grid markets, which include substantial battery storage. In the early days demand was merely focused on PV panels – which can only make their contribution during the day, of course.

Vangelis Beligiannis says: Our goal is to offer PV systems with back up capabilities and integrate the system during the building construction as smoothly as possible.  Most of the recent PV installations in Greece include battery storage connected to the PV system – but only offer a PV point as a backup or a backup with a peak power supply equal to the PV inverter power. Our goal is to go a step further and offer systems which provide full back-up using the Victron ESS technology.

This ESS systems has been programmed with the recently announced Dynamic ESS feature – an algorithm which automatically buys, sells or stores energy according to network’s changing buy/sell prices and the amortisation costs of harvesting solar energy. This will be a very welcome feature for the new net-billing contracts in Greece.

Dynamic ESS will maximise payback on either fixed or non-fixed feed-in tariffs.