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.

Stats update

It's the end of March, about to start a new calendar quarter, and a good time to review data for the quarter just ending.

Here's an interesting figure: our 1kW PV array has produced exactly half as much energy this quarter as our home has consumed. On average, the array produced 4.20kWh per day since the start of January while we consumed 8.40kWh per day. Just a coincidence - but a nice neat 50% figure nonetheless. Got me musing about the possibility of doubling the capacity and going off-grid.

On average, we exported 1.84kWh per day to the grid, which is just under half of the energy produced by the panels. Doing the sums, we must have imported just over 6kWh a day from the grid to meet our household demands.

The new fridge has been pretty steady at just under 1.5kWh per day, or 18% of our total needs. And the energy-guzzling computer my employer provided has been kept in check with an average daily consumption of 0.38kWh, or around 4% of our total. It has taken some very aggressive energy saving measures to achieve that, but I'm reasonably happy with that result.

Just one more factoid to close out the post. This week our PV array crossed the 1MWh line for total energy produced.

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.

Thorium links

Here are a few links to video presentations about the promise of thorium-fuelled nuclear reactors. There's a bit of duplication but each has some unique aspects and they differ in style.

Joe Bonometti and Kirk Sorensen (Google Tech Talk via YouTube)
David LeBlanc (Google Tech Talk via YouTube)
Robert Hargraves (WMV video)

Oh, and look! Jim Hansen (a leading climate scientist from NASA) advocates the development of thorium reactor technologies in an open letter to his new President, Mr Obama.

What if the energy/climate crisis was solved?

The reality of Peak Oil is pretty much indisputable as far as I'm concerned. If we can't find an equivalent alternative energy source in a big hurry, there's no escaping that the world is going to change dramatically. That's the underlying premise of the Transition movement.

But what if we do come up with an alternative energy source? One which doesn't change the climate, which won't be as destructive to the landscape as coal mining, which doesn't require practically eternal waste management to avoid poisoning the biosphere, which is affordable and practical, and which can scale up fast enough to address the twin crises of Peak Oil and Global Warming?

It's an incredibly tall order. But I'm becoming increasingly hopeful about the possibility of one particular technology, which I've written about before: the thorium-fuelled molten salt fission reactor.

Environmentally-conscious people have an almost instinctive reaction against anything "nuclear", and I understand that. On the basis of long-lived radioactive waste alone I also agree with it, in respect to the current fleet of uranium-fuelled reactors. But the fact is that thorium-based reactors have been designed and even tested which don't suffer from any of the major drawbacks of uranium-based systems.

Features include:
- Abundant, stable, safe raw fuel (100% usable ore vs 0.7% usable from uranium)
- Passive reactor safety (cannot overheat, not pressurised, no complicated mechanical control system)
- Proliferation-resistant (in particular it produces no plutonium)
- Produces very small amounts of relatively short-lived waste (~300 years, certainly manageable)
- Can burn high-level waste from other reactors
- Simple enough to mass-produce in a factory and deliver on a truck
- Electricity probably cheaper than today's coal-based prices

It sounds so good, why wouldn't it have been done before? Well it actually was done before in the 60's and 70's, but the US at the time was more interested in creating plutonium for their weapons program. Hence the molten-salt reactor research program was shut down. Research has now restarted in eight or so countries, including the US, India, France and Japan. Incidentally, Australia has the world's largest reserves of thorium, followed by India.

There is a fairly real prospect of this kind of mass-produced, cheap, safe (enough) reactor technology being available within 15 or 20 years, with known fuel reserves sufficient to power humanity for several millennia.

So what if that came to pass?

Well... it would help. But it wouldn't be sufficient to solve the problems of over-population, destruction of ecosystems, resource depletion and so on. In some ways it could actually make them worse, by providing humanity with the means to continue on with its awful business as usual.

So even if we did solve the energy problem there'd still be plenty of reason to keep working on sustainability in general. That's probably the way I'll be approaching the Transition work - it's absolutely vital if we don't find a new energy source, and it's still hugely worthwhile even if we do.

Cool! Stats

Past 11 days... average consumption 6.55 kWh/day, of which 1.36 was used by the new fridge. 32% of our consumption was supplied directly from our solar panels (just over 2 kWh/day) while another 2.64kWh was exported to the grid each day.

As a result of the low consumption and strong sunlight, we are now in negative territory for energy costs over the past 102 days (not counting the fixed service fees). The credit for our exported energy will exceed the charge for imported energy by about $2.

We've also had heaps of rain, so the tanks have been full almost constantly for the past six weeks or so.

Quick stats

It's been a great week on the electricity front. Household consumption was 6.86kWh/day. The new fridge has averaged 1.3kWh/day, about a 35% improvement over the old one.

Excluding fixed monthly service fees but including the solar feed-in tariff, our electricity costs for the past 91 days are, in total, $2.62. That's less than three cents a day.

Stats Update

Initial figures from the meter attached to the fridge are good. Including the initial cooling effort required after turning it on for the first time, it's averaged about 1.4kWh per day over the past four days. I've reset the meter this morning to correspond with reading all the other meters so I'll be able to build up a better picture of it over time.

The other energy figures are also good. For the past 39 days:
- PV generation up to 4.62 kWh/day
- Household consumption down to 7.88 kWh/day
- Export up to 2.26 kWh/day

We've had more than enough rain recently so the tanks are still supplying water for laundry, toilet and gardening. Hot water system needed boosting one evening during the rainy period but is otherwise cracking along in the spring sunshine. Our recent rates notice showed us maintaining a significantly lower consumption than our neighbours and so I haven't bothered keeping a close eye on the water meter.

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.

Stats Update

In the past 45 days...
Our solar panels have produced 187kWh of electricity (4.16/day).
87kWh of that has been exported to the grid (1.93/day), while 100kWh has been used immediately in our home (2.22/day).
We have consumed an additional 279kWh from the grid (6.2/day).
Total consumption is therefore 279+100=379kWh (8.42/day).
We have also used the electric booster for our hot water occasionally: 10.9kWh total (0.24/day).

Scaled up to 3 months, our bill (should AGL ever get around to sending us one) would look like this...
Tariff 11: 558kWh @ 16.29c = $90.90
Tariff 33: 22kWh @ 9.78c = $2.16
Solar export tariff: 174kWh @ 44c = $76.56 credit
Total: $16.50

Well, except that there's a monthly service fee of $6.26 for tariff 11 and the minimum monthly cost on tariff 33 is $4.36. So that brings it up to $37.48. I'd actually save $9.50 per bill if I switched my hot water booster to tariff 11... but there's a $50 charge for the swapover, which means a 15 month payback time.

Bottom line: at this point in time our 1kW array is producing just under half of our home's total energy needs, though only about half of that is produced when we actually need it. Thanks to the government's feed-in tariff, that misalignment of supply and demand has a very positive impact on our electricity bills. The energy we export is valued at 80% of the energy we import. The additional amount we produce and consume locally is effectively worth another $33 or so that doesn't appear on the bill.

The meter goes backwards

It's been a long time coming but we finally have a 1KW photovoltaic array on our roof. Too much detail to post via iPhone keyboard... but I watched our meter turning the other way this arvo. Way cool.

Meter matters

Two real-life examples of why meters are your friend and reading them is a good idea.

1. "Where did our water go?"

We've had a lot of rain this month. Following a two month stretch during which a total of 26mm fell at our place, we had over 220mm in just five days. That's enough to fill our tanks four times over. With no room for more water, I decided to let any further showers flush out the internal dirty water diverters and opened up the valves. Then promptly forgot about it.

It rained twice more in the following three days: falls of just a few mm but enough that I expected to see the new inflows make up for the water we'd pumped out for the laundry and toilet. But for some reason the gauge didn't go up. In fact it was heading downwards at a surprising rate - around 10cm (800L) in two days. I figured we must have been catching up on a lot of washing.

Two days later we were down another 800L. Something finally triggered my memory - the diverter valves were open! I suddenly recalled that the internal hose which allows the diverter to drain to the outside is not watertight, which means that water from the main chamber can slowly leak out when the drain valve is opened. We must have wasted well over a thousand litres this way.

If I hadn't put a gauge on the tanks and made a habit of checking it, we'd have lost half our supply (the valves are about halfway up the tank wall) within a few more days.

2. "The bill is for how much?!"

A week ago as I sat here working in my home office I noticed somebody briefly inspecting our electrical meter box. "Ah," I thought, "our quarterly electricity bill will be turning up soon." Well turn up it certainly did!

With all that rainy weather I mentioned just before, we had to use the electric booster on our hot water system for a couple of days. Imagine my surprise when the total bill came in at well over twice what I'd been expecting, with an off peak consumption for the quarter of one thousand, five hundred and twenty six kilowatt-hours! The charge for that was almost as much as I'd budgeted for the whole bill.

I hadn't read the meters since a few days before it rained, so I rushed out to check them. After sitting on 90615.3 for about eight months, the off-peak meter today reads... 90638.1. A grand total of 22.8kWh difference.

That's actually more than I'd been hoping to see given how little we used the booster, but it's rather insignificant compared to the matter of the invoice. The meter for the constant supply had also been recorded incorrectly - even today, a week after the reading, I'm still 157kWh short of what they're claiming. It'll take us another 20 days to reach that point.

The lady on the phone conceded that it was a bit odd to have such a spike, although for some reason this bill is recorded as being an "estimated" value. She spent a long time conferring with a supervisor before agreeing that the meter should be re-read. The soonest they could get somebody here would be the 20th (I told them not to rush on my account - I'm in no hurry to get a bill). And she made it sound like she was doing me a favour not charging me the customary $24 fee for a repeat reading (like hell I'm going to pay for them to fix their screw-up).

Ah well, I probably won't be paying too many more bills to that company anyway. I was already looking into switching retailers to get a better rate for the energy my PV panels will produce - 20c instead of 14c per kWh. And once that gear's installed you can bet I'll be watching the new meter closely indeed.

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".

More water, but it's all cold

Good news: it's raining again and the tanks are now over 50% full with more falls forecast for this weekend.

Bad news: combined with the lower temperatures and reduced sun intensity of winter, the persistent cloud has forced us to switch on the electric backup for our solar hot water system. It's been seven months since the electricity company saw that meter move.

Ah well.

Stats Update

It's 19 days since my last stats update, when the tank levels had fallen so low I switched the washing machine and toilet back to using mains water. I had calculated at the time that we had been using about 250L/day of tank water plus almost 200L from the mains. It's no surprise then that our recent mains consumption has been...

409L/day.

More than we were using over summer, but back then we had #3 in disposable nappies and now we're washing cloth ones almost daily. Less than I estimated we were using in the previous period... we are probably a bit more diligent with our conservation knowing we're back on mains supply.

After a month of zero rainfall, last weekend delivered a lovely little squall and dumped 14mm on us in under an hour. Approx 2.2kL added to the tanks, around 30cm above empty now. With the prospect for winter rains looking grim I switched the toilet back to tank water but left the washing machine on mains.

Power consumption for the past few weeks fell to the second-lowest reading this year: 7.3kWh per day (304W continuous).

A proposal for a means-tested PVRP

Following up on the previous post, this one explores some options for the design of a solar photovoltaic rebate program. Hopefully a better one than what we have in the real world today.

First let's look at the goals of the program. Overall, the intention is to invest a fixed amount of money over a fixed time period into the PV industry. There are a number of anticipated benefits for society as a whole:

- Develop the skills and infrastructure required for a sustainable PV industry
- Encourage R&D for technology improvement
- Put downward pressure on costs
- Improve competitiveness and effectiveness of PV in the long term

I would also like to throw my own goal in there (to nobody's surprise), encouraging overall reduced energy consumption in participating homes.

Now, the only reason I'm writing this is because I'm critical of the previous attempts on both sides of politics to implement this scheme. Specifically:

- A fixed rebate value skews investment heavily towards the smallest eligible system
- A fixed rebate value without a means test is socially inequitable
- An all-or-nothing means test is more equitable on average but introduces ridiculous boundary cases
- With or without the means test, the scheme ignores the number of residents in the household

The number of residents in the household is important for several reasons. In a scheme where a means test is imposed, surely the case of a single person living alone earning a hundred grand should be considered differently to a working couple with children making do on the same amount. Also, one of the factors involved in choosing whether to purchase a PV system is the amount of time it'll take to recoup the costs, and that gets us back to the topic of feed-in-tariffs. Under the import/export models being adopted by the states it's clearly easier for the single person to generate excess energy than it is for the family.

So I propose that a good rebate scheme would be variable. Different amounts should be paid in different circumstances, according to some reasonable criteria. The scheme should offer greater assistance to those with the greater need, but in all cases part of the cost must be borne by the recipients. Good in principle... but tricky to deliver. Here we go.

First I would suggest that the number of household residents be taken into account when evaluating "means". The simplest way is to divide the household income by the number of residents to work out an income-per-person figure. The single guy mentioned earlier scores $100K, the family of four comes in at $25K each. We'll come back to that in a bit.

My next proposal is that the maximum value of the rebate per household should also be relative to the number of persons. That is, a household with more people should be eligible for more rebate. However there's a risk here that providing funds too freely will encourage profit-taking in the installation industry, and this needs to be addressed.

One way to do this is to also tie the maximum applicable rebate to the generating capacity of the system being installed. We start by nominating a minimum "per-person generating capacity" figure - I'll choose 500W for convenience. Then in order to receive the full rebate for each of the four members of the family household, a system with at least 2000W rated output must be installed. If the family decided to install only a 1000W system, they would be eligible for only half as much rebate. (I hope that makes sense - I'll do some examples at the end.)

Now we need to work out the maximum rebate each person would be eligible to receive. The simplest way to do this is on a linear scale: we need to define the maximum value of the rebate and the upper limit of per-person income at which point the rebate reduces to zero. In keeping with the existing scheme, let's set the maximum rebate to $8,000 and the cut-off at $100K. That means somebody with a "means" of $50K would be eligible for $4,000; somebody worth $75K could get $2,000; and somebody enjoying a hundred grand to themself would get nothing.

Just one more thing. We really don't want to get into the situation where the value of the rebates produces upward pressure on the costs of the PV systems. So let's set an overall threshold which ensures that the household has an incentive to shop around: the total rebate payable shall not exceed 80% of the installed cost of the system.

Simple, huh? No really, it's not that complicated. Here are a couple of examples.

1. Bruce and Sharon live in a house they've bought together. Bruce is a public servant earning $50K while Shazza's cornered the market for organic lima beans and is raking in $100K. Two people in the household, with an average "means" of $75K. The household is therefore eligible for a maximum rebate of $2,000 per person, depending on the size of the array they install. With two people there's really only one option in array size: an entry-level system with a rated output of 1kW makes them eligible for the full $4,000. The best price they can find on such a system is $10,461. Since their maximum rebate is well under 80% of the total price it is paid in full and their net cost is $6,461.

2. Helen, Gary and their four kids somehow manage to get by on the $60K which Gary earns through his small business. With an average "means" of $10K per person, they are each eligible for up to $7,200 in solar rebates - provided sufficient capacity is installed. The maximum rebate would be applicable for a system rated at least 3kW (6 x 500W). Such a system is available for $26,361 - clearly far lower than the hypothetical value of the rebate at $43,200. In this case the 80% rule applies, limiting the rebate to $21,088. Helen and Gary decide they can't afford to spend over $5K even for such a large system, and instead opt for a 1.5kW system that with an 80% rebate leaves them with an outlay of just under $3K.

Some key points to remember. First, I'm just some guy with a few ideas and an internet connection. Don't crucify me if there's something really flawed with my suggestions. Second, there are a number of parameters here which could be adjusted to alter the amount of rebate payable in different circumstances, including the maximum per-person rebate amount, the threshold at which the rebate cuts out completely, the amount of generating capacity required per-person to qualify for that portion of the aggregate rebate and the fractional ceiling limiting the overall rebate as a proportion of the system's cost.

One big weakness I see here is that it's hard to predict how quickly the scheme would burn through its budget allocation. A possible remedy would be to vary the rebate parameters on a periodic basis - probably as part of each year's federal budget.

So there you go. That's enough of that I think.

About that PV rebate means test

Hi again.

By now I expect you've all heard that in last week's federal budget, the first under this new management, it was announced that the Photovoltaic Rebate Program (PVRP) would immediately be subjected to means testing. Specifically, the $8,000 rebate would not be available to households whose combined income exceeds $100,000 per annum.

Predictably, there's been an enraged outcry from the renewable energy industry and green groups, and of course the opposition parties have seized the opportunity to attack the government's credibility on climate change policy. ("Hi Kettle, I'm Pot! My, you're a lovely black colour aren't you?")

Like many commentators I have great sympathy for the small business owners and employees who've been enjoying a surge in PV installation activity as a direct consequence of the PVRP and who are now dealing with a sudden drop in orders. Yet I do not necessarily agree that the PVRP should have been left as it was. Let me explain.

In the back of your mind you must always remember this: photovoltaic technology is really neat, but it's a long way from ideal. For starters, today's PV is generally more expensive than other renewables. And it only generates power while the Sun is shining brightly. No matter how many solar panels we install in this country we'll always have need for other energy systems which generate significant power for the other 16 hours per day.

As a rule, I was no fan of the former government. So hopefully it should get your attention when I say that the basic premise behind the PVRP was pretty sound. $150M was allocated over five years to encourage industry development and hence further R&D in PV technology - not to generate as much electricity as possible! Maybe they were forced into it, I don't know, but it was a sensible notion to invest public funds in a promising sector of the renewable energy industry. Unfortunately... they didn't follow through with a sensible rebate scheme for the distribution of those funds.

The PVRP previously offered a flat $4,000. Better than a kick in the teeth, but with PV systems starting at around $12K for an average output of 4kWh per day even that wasn't enough to spur a lot of interest. The "battlers" still couldn't afford it and the more well-off could get better rates of financial return from other forms of "investment". So last year, possibly reading the pre-election mood re climate change, they doubled the rebate to $8,000.

Well didn't that just open the floodgates. They halved the effective cost of an entry-level PV system, bringing it within the reach of middle Australia and making the financial payback time far more acceptable. The take-up rate exploded, "with 35% of all solar installed in eight years of the program occurring in the last six months." (Quote from ATA e-bulletin 19 May 2008).

Poor Mr Swan. Elected to government on the promise of leadership on climate change, faced with the economic necessity of slashing government spending, he had to deal with a PVRP that had gotten out of control and was burning through its multi-year budgetary allocation at an alarming rate. There were only two options: put the brakes on the rate at which money was being paid out (by lowering the amount per payment or limiting its availability) or let it continue to accelerate before slamming into a brick wall a little way down the track when the money runs out. Clearly the brick wall option would be catastrophic for the very PV industry which the program was intended to foster.

So the new management decided to slow the rate of payments by introducing a means test, in line with the general policy of targeting financial assistance to those who need it most. In my personal opinion, that was a reasonable thing to do. The biggest thing to criticise is that it's an all-or-nothing measure tacked on to what was a poorly-designed rebate scheme in the first place.

Just for the fun of it I'm going to do a separate post discussing the actual impact of the means test, how it might relate to the also-announced green loans scheme, and explore an alternate design for a PVRP means test.

To wrap up this one, though, I would ask you to keep looking at the bigger picture and reserve your final judgement on this government's climate change credibility until we see their response to the Garnaut review. The PVRP is something that was inherited and that, politically, had to be carefully managed. Failure to slow the rate of payout would have harmed the PV industry and been attacked by the opposition as financially irresponsible. Axing the scheme (presumably in favour of something better down the track) or reducing the rebate would have sparked a political feeding frenzy. It had to be maintained, but carefully.

The Minister for the Environment put it this way on ABC TV: "We've got programs out there... which will ensure there is enough demand in the Australian community in the long term to get solar panels on roofs... and to make sure that we continue to build a sustainable solar industry into the long term."

Mind you, the other climate change measures announced in the budget weren't terribly inspiring... my guess is it'll be another year, the post-Garnaut budget, before we know whether the promised leadership will be delivered. Let's keep up the pressure.

"Greenwashing" concern re Solahart promotion

I just sent the following email to Solahart's Australian headquarters:

Hello,

Let me preface this by saying that I'm a very satisfied Solahart customer, having replaced my electric system just over six months ago and not wasted a single watt-hour of electricity on water heating ever since. However I was not so impressed with your company's recent marketing initiative involving a bumper sticker which reads, "My Solahart helps offset my car's CO2 emissions."

It surprised and disappointed me to have such a misleading environmental line come from a company which does an enormous amount of good through the promotion of renewable energy technology. Quite simply, that bumper sticker statement is false and potentially harmful.

The statement is false because solar water heaters do not remove CO2 from the atmosphere, directly or indirectly, and therefore cannot be counted as an "offset" against the burning of fossil fuels in a car engine. Instead, solar water heaters simply avoid the need to burn fossil fuels in power stations or in gas heaters. There is absolutely no relationship between solar hot water and vehicle emissions.

If the community truly believed the bumper sticker then they would feel less compelled to reduce their transport-related emissions in the false belief that they were somehow "offset" to some degree by their solar water heater.

Though it may have been an honest mistake or oversight, this promotion has the appearance of "greenwashing". At the very least, please cease the distribution of this bumper sticker immediately. I would also ask that you either send a follow-up retraction letter to all those who have already been sent a sticker (such as myself), or that you post such a retraction in a prominent place on your website or in another suitable public forum.

I would be more than happy to discuss these matters with you further - please feel free to reply via email or contact me on [phone number removed].

Sincerely,
Terry Brady

Bald Hills, Qld, Australia
http://2050vision.blogspot.com

Stats Update - now including tank water

Here are the latest stats for our electricity and town water consumption over the past 25 days, plus some new information on our tank water use.

Electricity consumption has increased again.
This period: 8kWh per day, or 333W continuous
Previous 21 days: 6.84 and 285
Average since start of year: 7.62 and 317.

Town water use is also up. I think it's largely my fault... love the hot showers in cooler weather. 189L/day vs 130 in the previous 21 days and 164 average since the start of the year.

I may have mentioned when I was planning my tank installation that I considered getting a water meter to measure how much water we pumped from the tanks. Well I didn't do that, but I did fit a water level gauge which shows the height of the water in increments of 10cm. I also bought a rain gauge at the start of February and started keeping records of daily rainfall, and I noted on which date my tank was last filled completely. I've observed that 1mm of rainfall causes a rise of 20mm in the tanks and I've calculated that 100mm of water in the tanks is very close to 800L.

Armed with all this information and the current gauge reading, I can estimate how much water we've used and when it's likely to run out. In the 21 days since last full the tank level has dropped from 110cm (full) to 70cm. Rainfall of 11mm has added about 22cm to the tanks, so we have extracted about 62cm in total. That works out to about 4960L, or 236L/day. At that rate we have enough water to last another 24 days without further rain and a full tank would give us 37 days supply in a dry spell.

What's startling here is the overall amount of water we're using... 189+236=425L/day. It's quite a bit more than before we had the pump installed but we aren't using any significant amount of water outside. That means we're using more inside.

The laundry has to be the main culprit. Once we had the washing machine hooked up to the tanks we started using cloth nappies for our infant instead of the evil but water-efficient disposables. So every day or two we now go through a big bucket of tank water for soaking and then an extra load of washing. Combine this with my slackening frugality in the shower and you would probably account for most of the roughly 100L/day increase compared with figures from six months ago.