Residential energy efficiency

Solar energy benefits the state by providing electricity at much cheaper rates than those of traditional sources, writes Matthew Wright.

It may appear counter-intuitive, but getting millions of solar panels onto rooftops saves more money than it costs. Feed-in tariffs enacted by state governments have enabled ordinary Australians using their savings to build a solar power station at home benefiting the community.

When those solar households who had saved to get their panels installed under the solar feed-in tariff programs export their solar production to the grid, which occurs mostly during higher demand daytime periods, they are given a slightly higher than average retail rate for the electricity they are selling. The prices they have been paid are relatively meagre when compared with the ridiculously high rates paid to big coal or gas power plants.

At the same time that little solar households who have invested their money in a rooftop power station are being paid between 44¢ and 60¢ per kilowatt hour, the old power companies with their dirty belching coal and gas plants are receiving as much as $12.50.

By Matthew Wright

CLIMATE SPECTATOR reports: Showering in solar hot water, it feels good outside and in. But what if your decision to shower in solar was, in part, misguided and is propping up the gas industry?

Well that's the case with most of Australia's existing solar hot water, backed by perverse government subsidies which favour domestic solar boosted by fossil gas.

Now, if you've reading this and you've got a gas-boosted solar hot water heater already, don't get me wrong, you did the right thing at the right time.

But times have changed and the now climate solution is renewables boosting renewables. Edson, an Australian hot water services manufacturer, has released their Heat Pump boosted solar hot water heater – or, as they put it, their Solar boosted heat pump.

Edson are combining the two most abundant renewable resources available to Australians: renewable ambient heat, which is the biggest source of domestic renewable resource, combined with direct solar through a set of evacuated tube collectors, which is our second biggest renewable resource.

By Matthew Wright

CLIMATE SPECTATOR reports: A year ago I retired my old, dirty and inefficient gas wall heater, when I had it confirmed that it was using a significant amount of energy heating up outside rather than just inside my house like I would have expected.

Australians are generally unaware about the renewable heat resources available to domestic households, as a clean, safe and efficient competitor to dirty fossil gas.

That's why I bought six air conditioners. Air conditioners have a bad name and a bad wrap and it's completely unearned and unfair. Air conditioners are wonderful technology, like a laptop computer, smartphone or radiology machine. Air conditioners should rightly be called heat pumps, because they pump heat from one location to another. In doing so they concentrate that heat. They can pump heat out of our room making it feel cooler. Or than can pump heat into your room making it warmer.

There is nothing to feel guilty about here.  What you should be feeling guilty about is if you don't have a reverse cycle air conditioners, and you're heating with gas or electric resistive (bar radiators, oil filled heaters, electric fan heaters etc).

By Trent Hawkins

Queensland's twin disasters, the floods and tropical cyclone Yasi, drew attention to the link between climate change and extreme whether events. Scientific research expects these disasters to get much more frequent and intense over time if no action is taken to rein in our carbon emissions. While we must plan and rebuild our communities to withstand extreme weather threats, we must also address those practices that have helped allow these threats arrive in the first place.

As the adage states: every disaster brings with it opportunity. In Queensland there is the opportunity to rebuild homes to minimise energy use and climate-changing carbon emissions. The homes built today in this mammoth rebuilding effort can help limit climate change, but only if the Gillard and Bligh governments take leadership.

THE federal government has the opportunity to switch the nation's power to renewable energy but favours attempts to make "dirty coal clean", according to the Australian Academy of Science.

Next month the academy will call on the government to give priority support to geothermal and solar thermal energy to make them major national energy sources, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.