Your Questions About Green Living

The Expert answers:

Hi Danrad. I’m also in Australia and do get 100% of my energy from renewable sources.

There’s basically two ways of doing it. The first is VERY easy but will never pay itself off, and the second is more expensive and involved to set up but will eventually save you money.

Okay, the first is to simply buy 100% green energy. Very easy, as all you need to do is to ring your energy provider and ask them to switch you over. Origin has probably got the best green energy. 100% renewable energy like this costs around 5c more per KW/h, and an ‘average’ Aussie home uses about 6,000KW/h per year, so it should cost something like $300 per year to be 100% renewable. Easy and cheap. But the catch is, you keep paying that money to stay 100% renewable.

There’s a lot more to Green energy than that too of course, like the politics involved (the government’s climate policy that was rejected last week would’ve pretty much killed off any environmental benefit of green energy…), so you’d want to look into it a bit more before signing up.

The second is by generating your own energy, and again there’s really two main types – Grid connected and off-grid supply.

A grid connect in effect trades energy to and from the grid to get the overall net 100%, and to generate 6,000KW/h per year you’d need to get something like a 4KW system which would cost about $45,000 without rebates (the best rebate we’re ever likely to see ended a couple of months ago, and the new rebate system is FAR inferior from both a financial and environmental perspective). With some rebates you’d get that down to around $38,000 or so. This will save an ‘average’ house about $1,000 per year, and with a Feed-in Tariff (assuming your State has one yet), you’ll earn about $1,500 per year with that, for a total annual benefit of something like $2,500. After 15 years the system will be paid off.

The bottom line for this system is that a grid-connect system should NOT be fitted to an ‘average’ house from a financial point of view. That house is MUCH better off spending money halving its consumption first and then spending $20k or so instead.

An off-grid system needs batteries instead of a grid connection, and will cost about $60,000 – $70,000 mainly because of the batteries needed. This sounds like a lot but is often far cheaper than getting powerlines into a farmhouse in a remote area. The used to be a $25,000 rebate available across Australia for this, but that’s only for WA now.

Hope that helps

The Expert answers:

SEI has excellent online classes that are ISPQ certified. Http://www.solarenergy.org/

The Expert answers:

What we are envisaging is:
all that is required- from fur, fuel, to fun, entertainments are self sufficient. It is possible in an understanding community, with proper planning for all – from animal breeding, herbs, crops, for computers, contact lenses, etc. Etc… , as in the old civilizations. While those generations used hardly a few k calories/day/person, & the population was not much, our set up, with much more population, mostly illiterate, uneducated
[ educated world only contributes even now for the NON SUSTAINABILITY, AND ECOLOGICAL DESTRUCTIONS, & IMBALANCES ! ] , set up, the sustainability CONCEPT is a tough thing to attain. Youngsters like you only can save whatever is available now for the next generations !

The Expert answers:

Chemistry is fun- you get to blow stuff up! Keep away from the nukes though, we don’t want to blow one of them up. Electrical is good. Someone also has to design new systems for installations on houses/businesses.

The Expert answers:

I think of solar. I live in a sunny location with little wind. I also get some of my power from hydorelectric, but I think we have tapped most of those resources already. I also live not far from a geothermal plant that was previously shut down and has recently been reopened and is generating electriciy again.