10 reasons the proposed Road User Tax is bad policy
Here are the 10 main reasons why the planned Road User Tax is flawed and counterproductive for Australia.
renewable energy
SA Industry Climate Change Conference
Very much looking forward to this week’s South Australian Industry Climate Change Conference. Last year’s event was very influential in increasing industry ambition on effective climate action, with an emphasis on practical outcomes. It was very well attended and brilliantly organised. Highly recommended.
Music – Society – Planet
A guide to this website
Music
- Gig guide – My upcoming adventures on stage with my friends in folk music and trad jazz are detailed on my Gig Guide.
- WOMADelaide – This is my favourite weekend of the year, and you’ll find some WOMADelaide stories here.
Society
- Inspirational activists – I’ve been lucky enough to meet and interview some extraordinary people, activists who work tirelessly to be on the right side of history: people who know the inequity of the status quo simply isn’t good enough and must be challenged. You’ll find some activist stories here.
Planet
- Saving the planet – It’s a slightly silly phrase – “saving the planet” – because the planet is quite capable of looking after itself. In fact if humans disappeared off the face of the earth, the planet would doubtless do better without us. But what we urgently need to do is to preserve our fragile life-support systems for the sake of future generations. We have a lot of work to do in both climate activism and practical emissions reduction projects. There are some examples of climate action here.
- Urban Ecology Australia – For a couple decades I’ve been a member of Urban Ecology Australia, an organisation that invented a cohesive theory of ecological cities, defined Ecopolis Development Principles, and then set about building a living example of an inner-urban eco-village: Christie Walk. You’ll find posts about my most recent sustainable living adventures here.
Planet Talks at WOMADelaide 2023
WOMADelaide is best known as a glorious long weekend of music and dance from around the world. But Planet Talks also gives some special opportunities for sharing ideas with some of the world’s most inspiring thought leaders and activists who are working on key global environmental and justice issues.
Big ideas to share
For 2023 much of the focus will be on the First Nations Voice to Parliament, the Race to Netzero, Rights for Nature and Crimes Against Nature.
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Episode 9 – Battery storage – adding a second Tesla PowerWall
2021 – Battery options modelling
In September 2020 we installed our first battery at Sturt Apartments, Christie Walk. You can read the story of our modelling, battery choices and lessons learned in Episode 7 – Battery storage – Tesla PowerWall 2
Everything had gone to plan with the installation of the battery; performance was as expected. The savings generated by our PV upgrade and the battery were flowing into our Green Fund, enabling us to begin planning for the installation of our second battery.
Our modelling indicated that our 21kW PVs were generating enough power to usefully support up to about 55kWh of battery storage, corresponding to 4 x Tesla PowerWall 2 batteries. In cost-benefit terms, a sweet-spot would be with 2 batteries. In the depths of winter in July – on many days – we’d still generate enough spare power to fully charge the batteries for use after sundown.
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Episode 4 – Major PV upgrade
Adventures with an environment-conscious inner-urban community
2019
For years we’d been tossing around options for increasing our solar performance without losing our high feed-in tariff (56c/kWh) for the 4.8kW PVs that were installed when the Christie Walk community built the Sturt Apartments in 2006.
But by 2019 it became clear that preserving the high feed-in tariff was a false economy. We’d be better off financially and environmentally if we replaced the PVs and inverters with a high performance 21kW system.
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Episode 3 – Evacuated tube solar hot water boosters
Adventures with an environment-conscious inner-urban community
May 2018
We started investigating the retrofit option for our hot water system: installing solar collectors as boosters to our existing heat pump hot water. One company stood out as a solid option: RunOnSun, based in the Northern Rivers region of NSW. Their website wouldn’t win a Webby Award for design, but the content is comprehensive and very educational. MD Andrew Butterworth has spent more than a decade applying Sydney University research on evacuated tube solar hot water and finessing it for efficiency and robust performance. The fixings supplied by RunOnSun are robust too; more than adequate to secure the system in cyclone conditions.
We decided to split the retrofit project into two stages. Stage 1 – 60 evacuated solar collector tubes – would be evaluated before moving onto Stage 2 – an additional 48 evacuated tubes.
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Episode 1 – In hot water again
Adventures with an environment-conscious inner-urban community
April 2016
Our apartment building (Sturt Apartments at Christie Walk) was nearly ten years old. It was time to start thinking about sustainability upgrades to reduce our carbon footprint.
Lighting was an easy place to start.
We worked with Adelaide lighting maintenance specialists Globebusters, who replaced unreliable CFL lights in our atrium stairwell and entranceway with long-life LED oyster lights and floodlights. In the courtyard, twin LED sensor floodlights replaced the old energy-hungry incandescent lights.
May 2016
Hot water; one of life’s great privileges. But our little luxury comes at a cost for us, and a carbon-cost for our warming planet. It’s a particular issue in our 4-level block of 13 apartments.
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Eco-city dreaming comes true
The facilitator asked us to do some dream-work. That’s normally not so hard, but there we were, standing in an awkward-shaped T-allotment strewn with bits of broken glass and featuring some derelict out-buildings. The site had previously been a city recycling depot and in a way one of our goals was to continue that recycling heritage. We were asked to dream of what the features would be for our ideal sustainable-living community on the site.
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New plans for solar thermal at Port Augusta
On 7th June 2016 another important step was taken towards decarbonising the South Australian economy. Solastor Australia announced detailed plans to build a solar thermal power station at Port Augusta.
In 2012 Dan Spencer reported for the New Internationalist:
“In July this year – faced with the closure of the coal plants – a community vote was held by a local group called Repower Port Augusta asking residents whether they wanted solar thermal or gas to replace the town’s coal stations. Overwhelmingly the community voted 4053 to 43 for clean air, more jobs and the chance to see Port Augusta lead the country by building Australia’s first solar thermal power plants.”
Years passed and despite the enormous enthusiasm of the people of Port Augusta, and tireless activism, little physical progress was made.
After a long study, Alinta Energy announced in September 2015 that it wasn’t feasible for it to build a solar thermal plant to replace its coal-fired power stations. Closure had been expected some time between March 2016 and March 2018, but the end came quickly with the power stations shut down on May 9th 2016. South Australia lost a significant part of its baseload power-generating capacity without any commencement of building a replacement.
But despite that, the transition to a green economy is well underway in South Australia. 41% of the State’s electricity grid generation was powered by renewable energy in 2014/15. And the South Australian Low Carbon Economy Experts Panel reported to the South Australian Government in November 2015 that it is feasible for the State to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
So this week’s announcement from Solastor Australia is tremendously important, particularly because the company is promising prompt action. They plan to build a grid-connected pilot plant at Port Augusta by the end of 2016, using scalable technology. The 1MW demonstration solar thermal power station will have several collector towers, each holding a 10 tonne block of graphite that can store the heat from the toroidal reflector mirrors for up to a week. Water circulating through tubing embedded in the graphite is converted to steam which then drives a turbine generator.
The full-scale grid-connected power station will have 1,700 collector tower modules and is expected to generate 110MW in winter and 170MW in summer.
Solastor envisages that this will be the first of many similar baseload solar thermal plants.
You can watch the Solastor Australia launch video on YouTube or on the New Internationalist Australia Facebook page.
BrianLoffler 