My Copenhagen Letter to Dirty Kev

I used to battle depression over the climate crisis. These days I'm having more trouble with anger towards "the establishment". Obama makes me want to hope, but I'm terrified that he'll do a Kevin on the climate too.

There's just over a month to go before Copenhagen and activism is in top gear. I went to a local 350.org gathering last weekend and just now I took advantage of Greenpeace's Dirty Kev campaign to send a letter to the federal government. The form letter is nice, but I had more to say:

Above is a form letter which I support 100%. Personally I wish to also express my anger and disgust at the way your government has handled the greenhouse gas issue over the past two years. Your action has fallen appallingly short of the inspiring promises and uplifting rhetoric we heard in the months either side of the election.

Professor Garnaut gave you sound, realistic advice which you arrogantly (or is it fearfully?) discarded. Your proposed CPRS does almost exactly the opposite of what is required to make a meaningful, morally-justifiable contribution to protecting the climate for my children. Your renewable energy legislation actually undermines efforts to reduce our nation's use of fossil fuels.

My family, along with thousands of others around this country, is prepared to pay actual costs, suffer actual hardship and make actual sacrifices to help realise an actually sustainable future for humanity. And what a wonderful future it could be!

Please: have the guts to face up to the reality of this climate crisis. We need genuine leadership to inspire this country to make strong decisions as individuals and communities. We need:
- radical improvements in energy efficiency
- deep cuts to energy consumption
- rapid phase-out of coal power
- to stop wasting money on CCS
- real investment in appropriate cost-effective renewable energy
- an actual debate on nuclear options (Gen4 designs, especially thorium-powered ones, and yes I'd have one in my back yard in preference to coal)
- a national decision to get off our arses and do something worthwhile

In closing, it's only fair to also thank you for your investment in education and internet infrastructure. I am in absolute agreement that building a sustainable, prosperous future requires the best possible education culture and world-class information technology infrastructure. But it will all be futile if we fail to turn around the global GHG emissions trend and get back into safe territory (currently estimated to be sub-350ppm) in the next several decades.

If you have even a mild concern about the climate and global warming etc, please make yourself heard now. There are lots of ways you can express yourself - sending Dirty Kev a letter is quick and easy.

6.57kWh/day!

Quick one.

Somewhere in March we took up the State Government's ClimartSmart Home Service and had a power meter installed. I thought it wasn't reading very accurately because the figures it was showing recently seemed quite a bit lower than the trend I'd been tracking through the regular meters.

But I hadn't read the meters for about six weeks. Did it just now - and our consumption has dropped again, down to just 6.57kWh/day for the past 44 days.

Apart from the fridge needing a bit less power thanks to cooler weather (1.2 instead of 1.5) we think the biggest drop comes from stopping our 4-yo son from having a pedestal fan blowing on his face all night, which he became accustomed to over summer. He liked it on the fastest setting.

I'll have to plug it in and measure its power draw to see if the numbers are in the right ballpark.

Water efficiency has become a lifestyle

It's a significant day for my part of the world: for the first time in a hundred months our regional water storage capacity is above 50%. At its lowest in 2007 we had only 16.7% and the government was seriously considering the need to truck or ship drinking water in to sustain the roughly two million people in the immediate area.

Thankfully that worst-case scenario never eventuated, and there have been a number of rain events that have brought the levels up bit by bit. Most interesting, though, has been the success of water conservation programs.

Under the most severe restrictions residents were urged to target an average per-capita water use of 140 litres each day - an enormous reduction from previous norms of around 300. By the time dam levels rose to 40% in July last year, we had stayed below "Target 140" for 52 consecutive weeks. Consumption dropped to as low as 112 litres per person today in one week near the end of that period.

Reaching the 40% storage level was the trigger for easing of restrictions and the revision of our target to 170 instead of 140. And what do you suppose happened to our water consumption?



I've trawled through the weekly press releases to obtain the reported usage stats since Target 140 was introduced almost exactly two years ago and graphed them against the target at the time. Blue line shows water consumption per person per day against the red line which is the target in place at the time: 140 and 170 respectively. There are 66 weeks reported for Target 140 and 32 for Target 170, both with a couple of weeks gap over the New Year breaks.

Visually, you might think that with the relaxed restrictions our water use went up dramatically. But in fact, the averages for each target period are 131.8 and 138.3 respectively - still under 140 even with the higher target!

Very shortly we'll be operating under a Target 200 regime. It's my hope that Brisbane residents have taken the water conservation message to heart and will continue to keep their consumption well under the nominal targets.

Because despite all the good news, our State Government still wants to dam the Mary River and is building desalination plants that will be powered by burning coal.

Oh well, it's a start.

Earth Hour? Try Earth Lifestyle

Awareness is the first step, I suppose, towards effecting a change in behaviour. So I probably should keep my inclination to pooh-pooh the whole "Earth Hour" thing in check.

Suffice to say: the amount of energy saved by switching off lights for one hour a year is going to make no noticable difference to the Earth or our continued existence on it, and giving people the idea that caring for the Earth requires us to give up electric light could backfire badly.

I pretty much ignored Earth Hour last night. Continued playing chess with my daughter, listening to some music. Our household energy meter said we were using around 200W total power - though admittedly the meter is rather inaccurate at those low levels.

My point? Conserving energy needs to be a core value that drives behaviour each and every day, not a once-a-year stunt.

Chillin'

Remember how pleased I was when our old electric hot water system died last year? Well I have more wonderful news to share: the fridge, which at 2kWh/day accounts for almost a quarter of all energy used in our home, has also reached the end of the line. Hooray!

Its ability to actually cool things, let alone freeze them, has been deteriorating over time. I recently replaced the seal on the freezer to stop a quite noticeable cold air leak but it really made no difference. The appliance wizard (that's what he called himself) only took a couple of minutes to diagnose a failing compressor.

Decision time. Replacing the compressor would make it cold again, but cost about half of what we paid for the fridge a decade ago. It wouldn't improve the energy-efficiency of the design. It wouldn't fix the broken shelf mount or the cracked door hinge. And it wouldn't give us the extra freezer space Michelle desperately wanted. Maybe it's time for a replacement.

Had heard great things about the efficiency of chest freezers. Actually, the really interesting idea involves converting chest freezers to chest fridges. Good insulation and a lid that opens on the top instead of the side makes for minimal loss of "coolth". However, there's no way a chest fridge was going to be acceptable in our kitchen - space issues, access issues, etc - but maybe we could use a chest freezer in the laundry.

Had also seen a standalone fridge (no freezer compartment) at a school, with an energy star rating that quite impressed me. Maybe one of those for the kitchen. Time to do some research.

The most efficient chest freezers on the Aussie market, according to the official figures, are Denmark-made Vestfrost units - the same brand modified to be a fridge in the earlier link. They have one model which is about the size Michelle would like, 250L, that's rated at a quite frugal 237kWh/year. Would have been a candidate if they weren't so physically large and surprisingly expensive. And imported from the other side of the planet.

Mid-sized efficient freezer options beyond that are surprisingly limited. We quickly narrowed it down to two: a 160L Fisher & Paykel chest rated at 307kWh/year, or a 180L Westinghouse upright freezer rated at 297kWh/year. Westinghouse looks better for us other than being imported from China. So what about the fridge?

Given our simple criteria, there was no contest. Absolutely hands-down, the winner is a brand-new model from Electrolux. A 400L upright single-door fridge that uses just 250kWh/year and it's made here in Australia. This product has the highest energy efficiency score of all 3000 refrigeration units in the database, bar none (it'd score 8 stars, but the ratings only go to six). Price is middle-of-the-range: more than the Asian products and less than the European.

So that was the plan. The Electrolux fridge and the Westinghouse freezer. Combined rated total of 547kWh/year, which is just a smidge under 1.5kWh/day.

Er, hang on. I'm going to spend a couple thousand dollars on the most energy-efficient appliances I can find and still only cut my power consumption by 25%? Admittedly I'd have room for a bit more ice cream... but... only 25%? There's gotta be a better option.

Turns out there is, if I can live with just a single six-pack in the fridge at any one time. Another member of the new Electrolux range is a fairly conventional-looking bottom-mount fridge/freezer. 359L fridge space, 156 in the freezer (more than our old one), and a rated energy use of 428kWh/year. That's good enough for a five-star badge, and it's made right here down under.

So I saved myself a few hundred bucks and improved my energy reduction from 25% to over 40% (based on rated consumption of the new fridge vs actual consumption of the one I had). The fridge was delivered today. Now all I have to do is convince Michelle that going from 120L to 156L really is a significant improvement in freezer capacity and we didn't really need a separate freezer anyway.

Yeah. Wish me luck.

More good news about slime

I am frequently critical of "biofuels" technology because of issues like poor (or negative) payback in energy terms and the competition for food production and so on. Once or twice I have mentioned algae as a possible alternative "crop" which may be able to capture solar energy in a chemical form that's suitable for production of liquid fuels. Well, the prospects for a bright slimy green future just got better.

A mob in the US has announced that they have developed a process for producing gasoline from algae, using wastewater to support the algal growth. The key breakthrough is that the fuel they're making is chemically identical to the stuff that we put in our cars today rather than "biodiesel": this makes it a potential direct substitute fuel requiring no change to existing fuel processing and handling systems and no change to our engines.

Of course I'm still going to advocate radical efficiency improvements a la Amory Lovins, but if this technology turns out to be viable and scalable without significant drawbacks then it's going to make a huge difference.

Read more via this link.

About time I could tag a post with "hopes".

Solar Tariff Tiff

There's a lot of noise being made at the moment about "feed-in tariffs", or bonus money paid to folks like me for energy that my new solar panels will feed in to the electricity grid. The debate centres around how to measure and price that energy. Here's my take.

There are two main kinds of benefit that large-scale distributed PV electric generation can potentially deliver to the community as a whole: environmental and financial.

The long-term environmental vision, which I'm sure most people would agree is the right idea, is for future society to be powered with cheap, clean, renewable energy instead of being dependent on the burning of coal or the fission of uranium which - even if the technology can be made "clean" - will both eventually run out. An essential feature of this vision is that we must become far more efficient in our use of the energy that is available.

And while it's obvious to most people that harvesting sunlight is sustainable and much cleaner than digging up and burning coal, not everybody is aware that having solar energy generation located nice and close to all our air conditioners is a great way to minimise infrastructure costs associated with peak demand and long-distance power transmission on hot afternoons.

A good feed-in tariff scheme for solar electricity would help to realise both kinds of benefit.

The Queensland Government appears to be following the South Australian lead in proposing a model under which I would only be paid a bonus for producing energy that was not simultaneously consumed within my own home. Just to be clear, that's excess energy which I produce but somebody else gets to use. This is broadly referred to as a "net tariff" scheme.

A number of groups, including the Local Power group through which I've ordered my panels, the Alternative Technology Association, Queensland Conservation, the Queensland Consumers Association and reportedly even BP (who make panels) are expressing disappointment in this and arguing instead for a "gross tariff" scheme whereby I would be paid a premium rate for all the energy produced by my panels regardless of how much energy I consume within my own home, or when. This is reportedly the model implemented in Germany, a world leader in terms of solar electricity generation capacity.

The motivation of the "gross tariff" advocates is fairly simple to understand.

Firstly, most of them genuinely want to see our society move as quickly as possible from fossil-fuel dependency to clean, renewable energy sources - which of course I agree with. Secondly, there's the financial self-interest: panel buyers want faster payback on their "investment" and higher long-term profitability while manufacturers like BP want to sell more panels. And thirdly we have an environmental loopback effect where making panels more financially attractive encourages greater adoption which takes us one step closer to having a clean, renewable energy infrastructure.

However, despite being both an "environmentalist" and a purchaser of solar panels, I don't agree that a gross tariff scheme is an obviously right choice for Queensland as a whole community.

In order to deliver on the environmental potential, the installation of solar panels must succeed in reducing the overall demand for energy from non-renewable sources. And in order to reduce costs associated with the grid infrastructure itelf, that energy must be delivered at times of peak demand. As I see it, the gross tariff schemes being proposed would actually erode both of those benefits from the inside, because it reduces the incentive for the owners of the panels to minimise their own energy consumption. Taken to the extreme, it provides an avenue for wealthy high energy users (and especially those addicted to their air conditioning) to cheaply maintain or even increase their energy consumption. I have actually had conversations with somebody who sees that kind of thing as an opportunity.

(Related post: Does energy efficiency encourage greater consumption?)

In contrast, the net tariff scheme put forward by the state is designed to reward those who find ways to minimise their consumption (delivering the environmental benefit), especially during those hot, sunny times when their panels are producing the most power (delivering the peak load infrastructure cost benefit).

Australian taxpayers are already contributing $8,000 towards my panels through a federal scheme to stimulate growth in the PV industry. Why should my fellow Queenslanders pay me even more in a subsidy which I could squander by simply using more energy and defeating the purpose of all that investment in the first place?

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Speaking of the bigger picture, I believe that the actual core problem here is that current retail energy prices are much, much lower than the true cost of the energy. Government subsidies to the coal industry, myopic belief in unlimited growth and a very bad habit of completely ignoring "externalities" have made it so. Gross tariff proposals make a certain amount of sense in that they come closer to recognising the complete value of the energy, but the proper objectives of such a scheme would be continually undermined by the disincentive to reduce consumption.

Maybe as a kind of middle-ground policy it would make sense for panel owners to be paid a modest flat rate for their gross production on the proviso that they sourced at least the same quantity of energy (or 100% of their consumption, whichever is lower) from GreenPower-accredited providers. That would help to direct funding into renewable energy projects. Mind you, panel owners could achieve almost exactly the same thing by simply not selling their RECs at the time of installation. (See my earlier post on that topic.)

Perhaps surprisingly, I'm leaning towards opposing "time-of-day" metering for retail electricity consumption at this point. The idea behind it is to charge consumers more for energy consumed during peak periods. Sounds sensible enough, but apart from smoothing the load on the distribution grid it actually favours the coal generators and erodes the benefit of having a substantial PV capacity. However if it could be shown that time-of-day metering reduced overall energy consumption and especially consumption of fossil fuels then it might be worth doing.

But the "elephant in the room" (to borrow a phrase I once heard used by Andrew McNamara) which apparently nobody is talking about is that over the lifetime of any new solar panel installation the retail price of energy is likely to go up dramatically. You can thank climate change, carbon trading, peak oil and population growth for that. Even without any kind of tariffs, that rise should significantly shorten the effective payback time for a PV installation through avoided energy costs in the future.

Queenslanders receive cash incentive to tackle climate change

Update 13/4: Most of what I wrote in this post still makes sense, except that the actual model proposed by the government is slightly different to what I though it was. See today's post for more detail.
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Great headline, huh? I can't claim credit for it - somebody in the Premier's Office came up with that one to catch the media's attention for today's press release about feed-in tariffs for private solar electricity generation. (Thanks to Ian for pointing that one out to me.)

Like most government statements there's enough spin there to make you dizzy just looking at it. The goods news is that behind the bluster is some really good policy. And a catch, of course.

The announcement lauds the Queensland government's decision to "pay households and business 44 cents for every kilowatt-hour generated from solar power systems at work and at home and fed into the grid." At first glance it sounds like every panel on every roof suddenly becomes a great money-spinner. However you need to read carefully into the definition of "fed into the grid." In the context of the rest of the release it becomes clear that the 44c rate applies only to any additional energy produced by the panels in excess of the energy consumed by the household or business. Your panels have to make more energy than you use before the government (or utilities) spend a cent.

You'd know by now that I'm quite proud of my home's energy efficiency. Our bill just arrived confirming our consumption for the quarter at 7.8kWh per day. (By comparison, Australian government figures I found via Google seem to suggest that the average Aussie household uses around 18, and some friends of ours just got hit with a bill for something in the vicinity of 50kWh per day.) To produce enough energy to meet all of my own needs in a year, I would need to install a 2kW (peak output) array which is estimated to produce almost exactly 8kWh per day on average. Even with the discount negotiated by the Local Power buying group and the federal govt's eight grand rebate I'd be looking at an investment of around $11,000 just to get my quarterly bill down to zero!

If I wanted to actually get some of the 44c/kWh action I'd need to install an even larger 3kW array - an additional investment of 7 thousand for a yearly return of around $650. Premier Bligh's offer doesn't sound quite so generous now, does it?

So I need to explain why I said at the top of this that it's "really good policy". Thankfully the explanation is simple: this policy promotes interest and investment in renewable energy infrastructure, but more importantly it provides a strong incentive to increase efficiency and reduce demand in order to get household or business consumption down below the capacity of smaller PV systems which are presently affordable thanks to the federal government's $8K rebate scheme. For myself, I'll be taking the 4kWh per day threshold as a personal challenge.

Though I may have to wait until the kids leave home before that becomes feasible. Good thing the feed-in tariff legislation announced today is guaranteed for 20 years.

Does energy efficiency encourage greater consumption?

My initial encounter with the work of Amory Lovins was everything he intended it to be: persuasive, compelling and inspiring. After watching his lectures it just seemed obvious that we should all be taking energy efficiency to the extreme in order to save heaps of money - not to mention the planet.

Googling about for a bit more info and context, though, it wasn't long before I came across some Lovins hatin'. This piece is a prime example. (The one I linked to - not the one you're reading now!) I know very little about the author, Bryce, and would have to agree with him when it comes to what I believe is the false hope in biofuels, but I really took issue with the last part of his essay where he recalls the work of a long-dead Briton:

The final – and most important – area in which Lovins has been consistently wrong is his claim that efficiency lowers energy consumption. And when it comes to arguing the merits of energy efficiency, Lovins’s prime nemesis is a dead guy – William Stanley Jevons – a British economist who in 1865 determined that increased efficiency won’t cut energy use, it will raise it. “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” And in the 142 years since Jevons put forth that thesis, now commonly known as the Jevons Paradox, he’s yet to be proven wrong.

It shocked and dismayed me at first. Now, after some consideration, I'm convinced that argument is fundamentally flawed when applied to the present day circumstances.

Jevons' postulate is based on at least two assumptions: that the available supply of energy will continue to grow over time, and that demand for the service that the energy provides is also unlimited. Think about the context of the early 1800's for a minute, as the industrial revolution was ramping up.

I'm no economist, but I have a notion that around that point in history the main constraint on economic growth was labour productivity - ie how much raw material could be processed by the human (and I guess animal) workforce. Then suddenly, with the invention of the steam engine, the amount of material which could be processed under the direction of one person dramatically increased. Instead of energy from food being applied through muscle, we had energy from wood, coal and other combustibles being applied through machinery.

I don't know exactly what happened, but it seems reasonable to think that the take-up of the new technology would have initially been constrained by high up-front costs, high ongoing costs in terms of fuel and maintenance and the need to train operators. You can also imagine that due to simple economies of scale - and the seemingly unlimited abundance of fossil fuels waiting to be dug out of the ground - both the up-front and ongoing costs would have trended downwards in reasonably quick time.

As that happened, the unit cost of production fell, making a whole range of goods affordable to people who never could have afforded them in the past. A vast reserve of energy converged with a vast reserve of market demand and the end result is the energy-squandering consumerist culture we have today. Any increase in energy efficiency during the time from then until now would simply have lowered production cost and therefore met with increased demand which in turn increased overall energy consumption.

But I suspect that era is rapidly coming to an end.

For starters, we are now seeing constraints on energy availability every way we turn. Even if it weren't for the fact that we've consumed such a large portion of the planet's fossil fuel stores, the greenhouse effect is imposing a major restriction on our use of what remains. Practical, environmental and security concerns get in the way of a rapid expansion of the nuclear power industry. What's left is a smattering of accessible geothermal resources and true renewables like wind, solar and wave energy. For these reasons, I think that energy availability may become the primary constraint on the economy. Increasing energy-efficiency then becomes a pre-requisite for economic growth... but overall energy consumption will be constrained on the supply side. So the first of Jevons' assumptions is no longer true.

The other assumption - that the market will respond to increases in efficiency by simply using more of the service - is more subtle. Let's have another look at what Bryce had to say:

While it’s true that improvements in energy efficiency on a microeconomic level – like replacing an old inefficient air conditioner with a newer high efficiency one – will cut consumption for that one location, when that same effort is spread over a macro scale the overall energy savings are usually swamped by overall increases in consumption. Thus the installation of more efficient air conditioners across an entire city or state, or country, allows people to use their air conditioners more and, since the cost of cooling suddenly becomes more affordable, more people install air conditioning.

OK, that makes sense. It's probably reasonable to say that humanity will find some way to use all of the available energy and there will also be continuing demand for more. But with energy becoming less available, a balance is likely to be found.

Getting back to Amory Lovins, though, air conditioning is a great point on which to end this post. You see, Lovins doesn't just advocate ongoing marginal improvements to the efficiency of air conditioners and cars. His vision is to design buildings that don't need to use energy to keep them cool, making the air conditioner pretty much obsolete in the process; to make cars which are so light and efficient (while also being roomy, strong and safe) that they can reasonably be powered by solar-generated electricity or a few handfuls of biofuel.

While it's true that our energy supplies are tightening up, the work of guys like Lovins means that there's the opportunity for improving the quality of life by continually learning to do more with less.

Sustainable Cooking

I've been pondering the issue of energy for cooking - the various energy sources and the technology for using them in the kitchen. Got a few comments and a couple of conclusions to share.

First, burning gas. If we're talking about the fossil fuel kind of gas, I'm opposed to it on the basis that it's a non-renewable, polluting source of energy. Pragmatically speaking it may be an essential part of our transition to sustainability but in the long-term the use of "natural" gas in the kitchen has to stop. I should also mention that in absolute energy terms it's rather inefficient: lots of energy used to extract and transport it, then lots of heat wasted into the air without performing any useful work.

Second, burning wood (or other biomass). In some cases wood is probably the best choice, but I suspect that'll be a minority. Wood is renewable, of course. It's also somewhat polluting especially in areas with dense populations. It's inefficient in terms of being able to direct the heat energy into the cooking but in cold climates that becomes a benefit rather than a problem. Not a good choice for my home though.

Next, solar. Do a web search for "solar oven" and you'll find lots of innovation around the basic theme of using the sun's heat to cook food in an insulated vessel. Absolutely top marks for being clean and sustainable. Not so great for cloudy weather, though, and hard to control in terms of temperature and therefore cooking time. I could imagine this technology becoming more common in the future if other energy systems are struggling to deliver the needs of society... but probably not my own family eating sun-cooked roast veges this coming winter.

Finally, heat from electricity - it's a broad topic. You have to look at both how the electricity is produced and how it is used. The production part of the discussion is well-trodden ground... everybody knows coal is dirty and non-renewable while wind/solar/wave etc offer far cleaner and sustainable sources. No, the really interesting bit is in how the electricity is used.

Most of us have heard that using our microwave oven is a more energy-efficient cooking option than using the standard electric oven or hotplate. That makes sense at first glance. It's not as cut and dried as it sounds, though: consider the case of my own microwave oven.

It's rated at 900W cooking power, which means in theory that it can generate lots of heat directly inside the food instead of heating the materials and air surrounding the food. But if it's putting 900W into the food, why is it drawing 1400W from my AC socket? 500W of power - more than third of the total draw - is being wasted by the machine, lost as heat into my kitchen without touching the food. That's not really very impressive. I've no idea whether other microwave ovens on the market perform any better.

What I do know is that induction cooking is often touted as the safer, more efficient alternative to traditional electric hotplates or gas burners. The technology is vaguely similar to microwave cooking, but instead of using radio waves to transmit energy into the food it uses magnetic fields to transmit energy into the metallic cookware. Proponents like to point out the 85-90% efficiency of converting electrical energy into useful heat (ie heat in the cookware, in contact with the food). Sure beats the 65% that my microwave is capable of.

But I reckon there's an even better electrical cooking technology that's being overlooked. It's cheap, and simple, and already well established in the marketplace. It's your regular old electric frypan. An electric pan has an embedded element which converts 100% of the energy it consumes into heat in the cookware. A portion of that energy is lost as heat radiates away from the pan, but the same could be said of induction cooking technology.

With some simple design improvements - mostly focusing on insulation - highly efficient cooking vessels with embedded electrical heating elements could be the eco-friendly kitchen technology of choice in the future, powered of course using electricity from clean, renewable sources.

High Tech, Low Power and Less Nasty

I have deliberately kept my work and my blog separate. The high tech company I work for has a very strict policy about the way employees represent it in public and it's a line I never want to cross.

Suffice for me to say, my employer has just released a new model of ultra-portable no-compromise laptop computer. It has a full-size screen and keyboard, runs the full version of our latest operating system, uses a fully modern Intel processor... and according to the published specs has an average power consumption of just 8W. Yes I have a tradition of liking this company's products but that little stat particularly impressed me.

It's also nice to see attention given to things like the materials choices (making use of aluminium for its recycling value, eliminating PVCs and BFRs etc) and packaging (smaller packaging increases transport efficiency, materials also selected for recycling).

And the best thing is that it's not just my employer who's doing this - lots of other companies are making actual improvements in their environmental impact. I wonder how far they can go with it by 2050.

Pipes and Pumps, part 3

I've recently stumbled across the controversial figure of Amory Lovins, a high-profile American advocate of radical energy efficiency improvents through integrative design, improved technology and really obvious (once they're pointed out to you) common-sense actions. In March 2007 Lovins gave a series of five evening lectures at Stanford University and these are available for free download as podcasts through iTunes. I found these less than a week after my pump had been installed... and boy did I wish afterwards that those two events had occurred in the opposite order.

In the Tuesday night lecture on improving energy efficiency in industry, Lovins focused fairly heavily on pipes and pumps. Apparently a very large percentage of the electrical energy used by industry is consumed in the motors of pumps. The point is made that due to the compounding energy losses between electrical generation (usually in a coal-fired power station) and consumption in the motor, even a relatively small improvement in end-use efficiency will be multiplied back through the chain to deliver a far more significant drop in generating capacity requirements and associated pollution emissions etc.

In the pursuit of those end-use efficiency improvements, Lovins laid down a number of basic principles for designing energy-efficient pumping systems. I encourage you to watch the lectures for yourself, but my quick summary would have to include:

- If pipework looks neat, it's probably inefficient
- Short, fat, straight pipes are far more efficient than long, thin pipes with corners in them
- Engineers tend to optimise pipes and pumps separately focusing on up-front cost, when an overall cost reduction can be achieved by optimising them as a system for efficiency
- By optimising the efficiency of the system you can specify a much smaller pump which costs far less to buy, run and maintain
- It's usually best to design the pipework *first* and then lay out the equipment around them

That first point especially hit home. Have a look at the pictures in the previous post or two - I actually insisted that the installer do a "proper" job and fit two additional 90-degree bends in the pipe that takes water to the toilet instead of allowing it to curve smoothly (but untidily). I'm quite sure that if I'd watched this lecture beforehand I'd have spent some time carefully designing and specifying the pipes and pump which are going to be a fixture of our home for some years to come.

Oh well. On the bright side, check out the water use stats I'm about to publish in a separate post.

Pipes and Pumps, part 2

The good news is that in terms of reducing our use of town water, this project is definitely meeting its objectives! We've done piles of washing and started flushing the loo again with wild abandon. I even hosed off the concrete along the back of the house after doing some top-dressing of the lawn. With the weather we've been having lately (lots of showers) we've been unable to get the water level more than about 1200L below capacity, and as of this morning the tanks were full again. Makes me wish there was some way to use that water for bathing as well.

However... all this water abundance has come at the cost of increased electrical consumption. Of course I knew that some electricity would be necessary to power the pump, but I've discovered two ways in which our setup is far from optimal.

First, the pressure switch. That blue gizmo on top of the pump which monitors the pressure and decides whether the pump needs to be running or not. Courtesy of my power meter I have discovered that the cost of monitoring the pressure is apparently about 15W continuous power consumption, or the equivalent of one rather bright CF bulb shining 24x7. In most homes that would be considered negligible, but in my home that's slightly more than a 5% increase in our average daily energy use.

The obvious solution to problems of that sort is simply to switch off the device when it's not needed. And sure, the pump needs an appropriate switched outlet to plug it into. But that would only solve part of the problem.

Three out of the four taps fed by the pump are used in such a way that it makes sense to switch on the pump before use and switch it off again afterwards - doing a load of washing, filling the tub or a bucket, using the hose and so on. The toilet, though, is a different matter.

With a toilet you need the water to flow into the cistern after your, um, "activity" is completed, and then only for a relatively short time. Can you imagine being required to flush, wash hands, walk to the laundry, flick the switch on, wait 30 seconds then flick the switch off again? Can you imagine teaching young children to do that? No, a simple switch is not going to suffice here.

The next most obvious suggestion is to install a second switch in the toilet, wired up in a 2-way configuration like many light fixtures are - such that flicking either switch up or down will change the on/off status of the light, or pump in this case. It would alleviate the walking part of the problem, but you'd still be left with the waiting.

What I'm hoping to do is a variation on that idea using a logical "OR" operation and a time delay switch. This switch is normally in the "off" state. When you push it in, power is allowed to flow but only for a minute or so until the spring-loaded mechanism returns to its initial position. So you push one button on the cistern to flush the toilet and then another button on the wall to refill the cistern, then you walk away (to wash your hands, of course). Either the laundry switch OR the toilet time delay switch can be independently activated to provide power to the pump as required.

Actually both of those switches will feed into the exterior switched socket that the pump is plugged into, so the correct logical expression is: (laundry OR toilet switch turned on) AND (external switch turned on) -> (a powered pump).

I foolishly bought all three switches today without first asking about the prices. Total cost $106. Could have saved twenty bucks if I hadn't asked for the laundry switch to have one of those little red lights in it to show when it's turned on. But anyway...

At current prices of 21.455 cents per kWh (15.455c regulated tariff 11 plus 6c GreenSwitch renewable energy premium) I'm going to have to have the pump switched OFF for about 33 thousand hours - nearly four years! - to recover the cost of the switches alone. But then I'm still predicting that energy costs will rise rapidly over time, and hopefully these switches will be in use for a long time after they've paid back their cost.

The moral of the story is to carefully check the electrical requirements of the equipment you're installing in a bid to save water. Thus endeth part 2. Next time I'll look at the other, far more important aspect of the energy efficiency equation when it comes to pumping water around: the pipes.


(Got any ideas about how to design a really efficient tank/pump system for home? Please share in the comments.)

Reflections on the Climate Change Forum

Many thanks to all who attended last night's forum at the Chermside library, hosted by BNCWAG. There were around seventy people including the group members and the politicians which means fifty or more responded to our invitation.

We had five politicians participating:
- Wayne Swan, ALP (current member for Lilley)
- Simon Kean-Hammerson, Greens (candidate for Lilley)
- Andrew Bartlett, Democrats (senate representative for Qld)
- Larissa Waters, Greens (senate candidate for Qld)
- Phil Johnson, Climate Change Coalition (senate candidate for Qld)

In some ways I felt it was a little unbalanced to have two Greens candidates on the panel, but I guess it's representative of their concern for the issue of climate change that they would consider it worthwhile to spend their time with us.

We opened with Dr Trevor Berrill's presentation which appeared to be well accepted by everyone present, including the politicians. Trevor did a brilliant job of setting the context for the night, with an emphasis on climate change as part of a broader concern for sustainability. He brought the issue home with a look at the local impacts and a call for local responses.

Mr Swan's political experience and professionalism is immediately obvious and he has an engaging speaking style - a combination which gives him an edge in keeping people's attention while he talks. I interpreted his position (and by extension the position of the ALP) to be that although climate change is the single most urgent issue facing humanity, it's not important enough to take any action which might harm the Australian economy. Unlike the Liberal party they've announced a target for GHG reductions by 2050 - I think it's 60% below year 2000 levels, based on the recommendations of the Stern report from the UK. But they are refusing to say anything about shorter-term targets until their own economic advice comes through from an analysis which is currently underway.

Mr Bartlett is somewhat more softly-spoken, with the air of somebody who weighs his words carefully before he permits them to become speech. A serious but not sombre man who earned a warm reaction from the audience for his assessment of "clean coal" as a marketing term chosen more for its emotive effect than its accuracy. As he pointed out, "less-dirty coal" is more truthful but doesn't have the same ring to it. And although I can't recall many specific policy details I gained the firm impression that this thoughtful bloke represents a party that's genuinely interested in the advancement of humanity in an ethical, prosperous and sustainable fashion.

Mr Kean-Hammerson was the third speaker, and I mean no disrespect when I say that he did not appear to be very practised in the art of public presentation. The Greens policies have been online since March so there's not much to say in that regard other than to suggest you go and look them up if you aren't familiar with them. With regard to climate change specifically and sustainability in general, I suspect that my own vision and values are more closely aligned with the Greens than with the other "major" parties. I'm not entirely sure I'd be comfortable with a Green majority in parliament but their influence, especially in the Senate, is welcome. To get back to Mr Kean-Hammerson individually, I was fascinated by the insight gained through his childhood in Kenya (I think it was Kenya, please correct me if needed) with regards to social and industrial development. If you're a voter in the Lilley electorate, try and find an opportunity to speak with this man and get to know him a little better.

The introduction of our fourth speaker marked a small milestone in history. The Climate Change Coalition was only registered as a political party three weeks ago and last night was the first public address by Mr Johnson, who is standing for election to the Senate. As you can infer from their name they have a fairly focused agenda. Mr Johnson has a background as a professional in the health sciences and acquits himself well in front of an audience. The sceptic in me rates the party's election prospects as poor, but I'm a bit inclined to give Mr Johnson my primary vote as a statement of support for his policy objectives.

Ms Waters had the closing statement and an opportunity to repeat the Greens key messages. A 30-year-old environmental lawyer with a somewhat vivacious style, she pressed the case for Greens seats in the Senate as the only way to break the Liberal/National coalition's influence in government even if Kevin Rudd is successful in his bid for the Prime Minister's office. It's an argument that bears some serious consideration.

Now to try and summarise some of the audience's questions and the responses as best my recollection allows.

A challenge was made regarding the accuracy of the term "clean coal". Unsurprisingly four out of five candidates agreed that it was an oxymoron while Mr Swan stuck to the party line in stressing the belief that coal-sourced power is essential for Australia's economy in the foreseeable future.

The candidates were asked whether any of them were brave enough to face the public and urge us to change our consumptive behaviour in the interests of efficiency and sustainability. The most memorable response came from Ms Waters who declared that she tells people not to buy things they don't need because it won't make them happy and it harms the environment.

Mr Swan was challenged regarding the relative importance of climate change versus the economy. His response was the standard ALP cake-and-eat-it line with reference to the Stern report and the need to wait for the results of their own analysis before committing to any "rash" actions. I understand the need for a large party like the ALP to be cautious with their policy development and disclosure but I can't avoid the impression that they consider the possibility of recession to be worse than the predicted effects of climate change. If that's not true, the ALP needs to do a better job of communicating it.

An insightful question came from none other than Doone Wyborne of Geodynamics fame - the company which is attempting to develop the hot rock geothermal resource in South Australia. He asked about the parties' stance on population management. Unfortunately I wasn't able to listen to all of the responses but I did catch Mr Bartlett's comment that he wasn't a fan of "steady-state economics" but saw economic growth within a stable population as being necessary to alleviate poverty. Mr Swan expressed concern about the social consequences of a reducing population, advocating instead a long-term policy of "replacement", ie zero population growth. Mr Kean-Hammerson described a conversation with an African villager in which numerous children were seen as a necessary component of family life at least partly for their capacity to do work such as water carrying: the provision of electricity to perform such practical tasks would, it was claimed, reduce the incentive to bear more children.

I also took the opportunity to ask a question myself. It was prompted by Malcolm Turnbull's comment about the prospect of achieving a global zero-emissions electricity sector sometime this century and based on my belief that values drive behaviour. The first part of the question was directed towards Dr Berrill: is it feasible? His answer, essentially, was yes - provided we're all bloody serious about achieving it. The second part was for the politicians and all I needed was a yes/no answer. "Do you dare to envision a society like that?"

I was pretty sure that the Greens and the Climate Change Coalition would answer in the affirmative. The Democrats I had hope in. But I was concerned that the ALP - in reality the only party with a chance of wresting control from the nuclear-bent Liberals - would prevaricate or maybe even deny the possibility that an advanced technical society could achieve balance with nature. If the ALP wasn't even considering a zero-emissions future then the fight for climate action in the next few years would be a difficult one indeed.

To my delight, every one of the candidates including Mr Swan delivered an unqualified "yes" in response. I am yet hopeful for the future of human civilisation.

Money and power

This past week has had a fairly clear theme for me: the price of energy. There's the record-breaking crude oil prices, a discussion at our BNCWAG meeting about the confusing options for buying renewable electricity and then of course the replacement of our hot water system with a solar one.

Lets leave the oil issue alone for the moment (partly because the record prices are being kicked along by a weak US dollar which reduces the significance of the raw numbers). Just now I'm more interested in the electricity market.

Here in Queensland the energy market is regulated. There are fixed tariffs for the supply of electricity to various types of customers for various purposes. Most homes have two circuits: one which supplies electricity for general domestic purposes 24 hours a day for roughly 15c per kWh, and another which typically is connected to a water heater but only works during off-peak hours and is billed at a much lower rate (as low as about 6.5c per kWh).

These prices are the new ones, following an increase at the start of July which was largely attributed to the rising cost of producing electricity with cooling water being in short supply due to the drought. Ironically the drought conditions have led to a significant reduction in shower times and a corresponding reduction in the amount of water heating required. My most recent figures have us averaging 7.3kWh per day this winter at a cost of around 47c.

Now here's the bit which is bugging me. If my shiny new solar hot water system was so good that it never needed any electrical boosting (it's not), and assuming that we required that same amount of heating all year round (we don't), it would take just shy of 30 years for us to recoup the cost of the new unit from the savings on our electricity bills.

I can imagine my wife's raised eyebrow and my father's shaking head about now. But even having run these numbers I would still make the same decision again. It's only bugging me because it makes it harder to convince other people that it's a decision they'd want to make too. There are three reasons I want to point out here.

1. This is mostly about saving energy, not money

The pursuit of short-term economic advantage is what led to our current dirty coal infrastructure and is what maintains the hegemony of the coal industry in Australia's energy industry.

The reason that electricity is available at less than half price overnight is that the massive steam turbines in the coal-fired power plants cannot be switched on and off in a daily cycle. The operators of these plants need to smooth out the demand curve over the course of the day and these skewed pricing arrangements help them achieve that by encouraging additional energy consumption during the night.

It works too: this past quarter my water heater used more energy than everything else in the rest of the house combined! Though it will reduce our bill by less than 30% and at these prices will never pay for itself, installing a solar hot water system is going to approximately halve our total electricity consumption.

2. Electricity prices are likely to rise sharply - even for dirty coal.

There are a number of pressures on the electricity market which I suspect will cause prices to rise sharply over the next couple of decades. If you forgot about sustainability concerns completely you'd still have decreasing availability of cooling water, increasing global demand for coal, increasing local demand for electricity and the need for infrastructure work on generation and transmission.

Now I do hope that the sustainability and environmental agenda is going to have a powerful influence on future policy and development. This would lead to greater reliance on wind and other renewables which have a lower overall capacity, generally higher cost (than the present price of coal where many costs are subsidised or simply not accounted for) and a different delivery profile (solar, for example, is obviously linked to daily cycles).

All in all I expect the price of a unit of energy for the end user like you and me is going nowhere but up. Hopefully through a range of efficiency measures we can keep our overall costs from rising. My Solahart might turn out to be an economic winner in the future.

3. It's in keeping with the philosophy of sustainable design

I keep thinking back to McDonough's work on architecture and building design and his philosophy of making the best use of the available natural resources. Without the solar water heater up there the sunlight's energy would be wasted. My vision for the future is nowhere near as vivid as McDonough's but I'm quite certain that I'd expect to see solar heating in a place like Brisbane.

He was only 19... now where's the new kid?

There was a death in the household today. Finally!

Our hulking great electric-storage hot water system sprung a leak this morning after spending 19 years turning one of the most useful forms of energy into one of the least. Hooray and good riddance.

It was a bit of fun in a way. The silly thing was installed inside (presumably so we didn't lose too much heat during Brisbane's biting winters...?) which meant that a sudden leak was something of an emergency. Had to try and shut off the water coming into it and hold open the valves to let as much water as possible escape through the overflow pipe instead of onto the laundry floor. Then discovered that the inlet shut-off tap, which probably hadn't been used in nearly 20 years, just didn't work. The only way to stop the water from flowing was to turn it off at the mains.

Right about then I called Solahart and booked a guy to come out and see us ASAP, which was originally defined as 4:30pm but ended up being closer to 6 after he forgot and I had to chase him up. Oh well, these things happen. In the meantime I had to restore mains water for all our other needs like drinking and flushing the toilet - I ended up removing the inlet tap completely and sealing off that pipe with a brass cap that set me back the princely sum of one hundred and five cents.

I was surprised in the end by the advice we received and the product we ended up ordering. The bloke said that in a place like Brisbane which gets so much sun you should actually avoid buying the most thermally-efficient solar water heaters because for much of the summer you'll end up with water being heated to boiling point, which means a whole lot of water being released down the drain and being completely wasted. With that in mind and having given due consideration to the orientation of our house and the load-bearing capacity of the roof, we're getting a 300L roof-mounted model from the lower-end "L Series".

Because of the weight distribution it'll be mounted flat on the roof facing slightly north of west instead of on a riser which would have had it facing slightly east of north. To compensate for the reduced exposure to the sun it'll have three collector panels instead of the usual two.

If we're lucky it'll be installed before the weekend.

Renovating for water-efficiency

We bought this place and moved in almost two years ago with the intention of staying for at least twenty. Location, size and price were the key criteria. Water and energy efficiency were not even on the list - if they were we might have chosen not to buy this one.

This post is a bit of a look at the physical attributes of our house in relation to water efficiency and the improvements we're in the process of installing.

The building is basically rectangular with the top edge in this image facing just slightly east of north. It's about 22m long with no eaves at the ends, and about 9m wide including the eaves along each side. Were it a complete rectangle it'd be almost exactly 200 square meters of catchment area.

The roof has a single centre line running the length of the building and falling away to the east and west. There are five downpipes for stormwater drainage - one at each of the corners along the long sides. It doesn't make sense to try and get the water to flow just to one end of the house so two tanks are needed if all the run-off is to be captured. Since I don't have room to install tanks half way up each side of the house, the only alternative is to put them at each end and install pipes to bring the water around the corners.

Siting the tanks was made more difficult by the 1m concrete apron which runs completely around the house. Early ideas involved a new concrete slab which partly overlapped the apron but my more recent preference towards using crushed rock for the base pushed them that meter away. That in turn had an impact on designs for the stormwater pipes which need to be high enough for people to walk safely underneath. In the end they'll be positioned as per the image: it's a compromise between the practical and aesthetic challenges of running the pipes as well as the limits on available space.

The tanks we chose are 5000L each, calculated to hold approximately one month's worth of rainfall in an "average" year. They're made of plastic with a ten year guarantee and I hope to extend their life as much as possible by shading them from direct sunlight. At 2.2m diameter they're only 1.6m tall in the centre and about 1.3m at the inlet. An internal first-flush diverter (it has a dedicated drainage outlet at the side of the tank) will reduce contamination from dust and debris and the inlet filter is designed to take the weight of a child without breaking.

Up until recently (when I was writing up a comment on another blog) I had envisaged using one tank solely for gardening and the other for washing clothes and flushing the toilet. But after realising that Julie's tank, half the size of mine and with comparable inflow expectations, would make available something like 160L/day just for the garden I had to reconsider that approach. Our block is flat so I'm now looking at installing a permanent hose between ground-level outlets on each tank: this will allow the two tanks to function as a single 10kL reservoir.

In order to supply the toilet (thankfully there is just one, dual-flush) and the washing machine the plan is to install a small electric pump and two new taps - one in the toilet, one in the laundry. We'll manually attach the hoses to those taps when there's water available in the tanks, and manually switch them over to the town water supply when the tanks are running low. Doing this should avoid any problems with backflow or pressure and makes a top-up valve unnecessary. Both rooms are on the western side roughly two-thirds up.

If the tanks do end up linked together it would probably make sense to install an external pump-powered tap at the northern end near the gardens. And a tap over the laundry sink might be smart as a way to access tank water for other internal uses like filling our gravity-fed water filter or even just mopping the floor.

So after all of that, our two remaining consumers of town water will be the kitchen with its dishwasher and the bath and shower. We'll still be drawing some water from the river systems but hopefully the rain that does fall on our heads will be put to some use instead of being channelled straight out to sea.

Finally I ought to mention cost. A combination of Brisbane City Council and Queensland Government rebates worth $1,850 are applicable to this little project. The only expense so far has been the tanks themselves at about $2,600. I have another thousand dollars set aside to pay for materials, a pump, an electrician and a plumber... though I'm not entirely confident that's going to be enough.

Getting tanked!

Working from home today, there was an unexpected knock at the door. Bloke with a truck and a surprise delivery:



That's ten thousand litres of rainwater storage capacity. We weren't expecting these for another month or two. But at least I know what I'm doing this weekend now.

Would you pay an extra $3 per litre for fuel?

A little while ago I wrote about my very nice but fuel-thirsty car and the arrangement I've entered into which obliges me to drive at least 25,000 km per year in it for another two years. My real issue with that is not so much the CO2 emissions (which can be offset to some degree) but that it's consuming an excessive amount of non-renewable fuel.

As I promised to do in that post I've been looking into my options for switching to something more efficient. The car which has caught my attention is a small four-door with a continuously variable automatic transmission (aka CVT) and fuel economy rated at a very impressive 5.6L/100km. And to my surprise there's actually more headroom in that tiny car than in the one I have now. At about $23,000 on the road I think it'd be a good choice.

But there's a problem with the financial side of things when it comes to the car I have now. The lease company wants thirty grand as a payout, and the car's worth only twenty as a trade-in: so if I want to do this it's going to cost me ten thousand bucks.

What will $10K get me? Well, over the next two years it'll drop my fuel consumption by about three thousand litres, assuming I were to continue to drive the same distance. Divide the one by the other and you get $3.33 per litre as the amount I'd be paying for the sake of using less fuel. (That's ON TOP of the actual cost of fuel at the pump!)

Of course the new car would cost less to purchase and run, so there'd be some compensation along the way. I haven't done the sums yet to work that one out, but I can imagine it still being in the vicinity of $3/litre.

I'm not sure I'm willing - or able - to do that. And besides, there's still the issue of what happens with the old car. A huge amount of energy was consumed making the thing, and it still performs its intended function perfectly well. It probably wouldn't be helping the overall cause to prematurely dispose of it.

So I guess there are three things I can do for the next couple of years to minimise the overall impact of my use of the car I have now:

1. Drive as efficiently as I possibly can.
2. Purchase CO2 credits to offset the car's emissions.
3. Consider whether it's worth paying the tax penalties for not driving 25,000km a year.

That last one would also make the car more valuable at the end of its lease period. Hmmmm.

Adelaide shows the way

The southern Australian city of Adelaide is the target of many an unkind word from the mouths on the eastern seaboard, but I wish I could spend some time at Christie Walk and talk with the people behind its design.

Many aspects of sustainable living are reflected in this gorgeous building complex, from the use of natural light and ventilation to solar hot water heating to the rooftop gardens. I would love to live in a house that was something like this.