Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Are you a fan of smarter energy use?
Now that summer is well and truly upon us it is time to talk about how to stay cool without blowing the energy budget.
Keeping the heat out in the first place is smarter than trying to cool your living spaces after the fact:
- Make sure your home is as draughtproof as you can make it – this will help keep you warmer in winter as well!
- On hot days keep the curtains closed – lighting a space takes less energy than cooling especially if you are using leading edge LED lights – if you have external blinds or awnings, use them
- Set your ceiling fan to summer mode and use it in preference to air conditioning – you’ll be surprised by how much difference it makes
Finally…a price on carbon pollution
At long last, we have a price on carbon and now the work can begin to create an Australia that makes use of its amazing renewable energy resources for electricity production in particular.
This has been a long time coming but with a “blood oath” hanging over this legislation, this is also the time to make sure we move from talking to doing quickly.The best way to create acceptance of the new technologies to be deployed is to get them up and running so that the “chicken little” comments can be shown to be just that. Most people will see that the sky hasn’t fallen in – sure, you will get certain interest groups complaining and big carbon polluters will have to change the way they do things. Sometimes change can be difficult, especially if you have been used to doing the same thing day-in, day-out for well over a century. There are opportunities to be had and the sooner we get on-board and develop our expertise in these new technologies, the more benefit we can make of the global move to a clean, renewable, low carbon lifestyle – one in which our children and grand-children can live without the diabolical consequences of having to deal with runaway Climate Change hanging over their heads.
A vision for the future
I want to try to get the idea out there that we can do better than merely providing renewable energy for our own needs. Australia has renewable energy resources that are the envy of nearly every other country on earth and, at present, we are using only a small fraction of what is possible.
Desertec has done calculations that shows that an area of land 300km x 300km (90,000 km2 – a fairly sizeable block of land) was capable in 2005 of providing the electricity needs of THE WORLD! This area is shown in orange on the map below for illustration purposes. BTW, this is using technology that is available TODAY, not some pie-in-the-sky unproven technology – concentrated solar thermal with molten salt storage of the kind promoted by beyondZeroEmissions.
