Successful Trials Lower Bills by 40%

Here is an update on what we have achieved, the learnings from some successful trials. And an important next step for you to take.

Actually, it all feels a lot like learning.

Is Noosa Behind Other Communities?

You might have seen quite a few cities going for 100% renewable energy (or even claiming to have achieved it, see Canberra). And they are right, in a way.

Canberra uses a total of 650GWh of electricity per year. And they are purchasing that same volume of electricity from 5 wind farms.

The thing is that wind does not always blow. So when there is no wind, they are using coal powered electricity. From an accounting perspective they are later buying the same amount of wind power and thus offsetting all of their electricity through renewables.

But it is not a real or sustainable solution, because it is impossible to replicate it across all of Australia (or the world). We would have too much renewable electricity at certain times. And unless we learn how to store or export it (possibly as hydrogen), it would just be wasted.

The stronger solution lies in aligning our electricity consumption with the production and becoming more energy efficient. That’s what my research has been focusing on.

Right now, it is still complicated to achieve that in an economical way. Why? Mainly because various pieces of the puzzle have been solved, but they have not yet been put together in a comprehensive whole. 

I am hoping that we can pull these solutions together in Noosa to really make a difference.

Here are some of the small steps from the last few months:

Successful Trials Save 40% at my Office

We have been able to reduce the electricity bills at my office from $800 per quarter to about $470. That is reduction of 40%! I am not saying that this will be possible for everyone, but it is a good first step towards our goals. And most of our office consumption matches the exported solar electricity from my home in real time. 

In addition, we have changed over to LED lights, which is going to make another big impact. I’ll let you know in a few months how that went, but on the day we installed them, the afternoon consumption was half of the morning consumption (total usage, not just for lights). We have also installed an automated switch that turns our water cooler off at night and on weekends (basically when we don’t need it).

Extending it to the Whole Building

We have set up monitoring devices to look at electricity consumption accross all tenants in our building to see how a shared solar system would reduce costs for all of us. Initital estimates look like we could achieve a 50% reduction in costs. 

Solar Financials

There are a couple of large commercial sites we are in discussion with about organising solar for them. Finance is something that needs to be solved, so we have been looking at the best ways to make that possible through our community.

As a community the Noosa region is are spending $77 Million for electricity each year. Imagine if we actually produced most of that electricity on our roofs and kept the value in our community!

Demand Management Solutions

I have talked to countless technical solutions for demand management – the ability to move some of our electricity use to specific times (such as turning devices on when lots of solar energy is available or turning them off when the grid is overloaded). This has been available in commercial settings for a while. Some solutions for residential and small businesses are getting close, but nothing is quite there yet. I also talked to a couple of university research projects that promise a solution.

Retailer Negotiations

And I have started negotiations with retailers. What became clear from that is that we need more details, rather than just a number of interested people.

Fom the initial post on facebook, we got just over 100 people who signed the action declaration. Some more trickled in after that and we are at 133 participants now.

Your Action

Now we need your electricity consumption history. So please take these steps now:

1. Find and open a pdf of a recent electricity bill
2. Search for the NMI on there (this is the number for your electricity meter)
   just use Ctrl-F and search for “NMI”
3. Head to the Energex Authority form, upload the bill and fill out the details

Once you have done this, Energex will send us your electricity usage over the last 2 years. We’ll aggregate these electricity details and use it for our negotiations (and come back to you with some additional suggestions).

Other than that, please share with your friends and colleages. The more we are in the bulk purchase, the better we will do.

And let me know if you have any other suggestions, ideas, questions, criticism.