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I’m Grant Symons. I convene Transition Edge
to help us understand how we can transition to a low carbon sustainable world using leading thinking and practices.
Last week we got a note from
Andrew O'Keeffe, one of our Transition Edge subscribers in Australia. Having recently moved away from city life he is now living in the country in Northern New South Wales, while exploring various ways of living with an increasingly lower environmental impact. He has just extended the home solar system and has kindly shared this first-hand account of the experience.
Hi Grant
Thanks for your recent article on energy usage and the challenges of energy supply. With our recent experience, my wife and I have suddenly expanded our understanding of the challenges. A couple of weeks ago we extended the solar power capacity of our home – which has revealed:
a) how much battery capacity is actually required to power a lifestyle or
b) how we need to moderate our lifestyle to fit with
our solar power generation and storage!
The improvements we made included adding 22 new panels to our existing 16 older panels. This gives us 9kW of maximum production. Up to this point we had no batteries. We wanted to be self-reliant and harvest our beautiful sunshine, so we installed two batteries giving us 17 kW of storage. On most days we are reaching maximum storage capacity by lunch time, or on cloudy days certainly by mid-afternoon.
The interesting part is what happens after the sun goes down! On a cooler night recently we had two heaters running. By the time we went to bed, all our lovely stored energy had been spent – we were back on the grid to keep our fridge and other essentials going until sunrise. Conversely, last night we didn’t use the oven and stove – consequently we stayed at about 80% stored capacity overnight.
We’d read about how heating and cooling
burns energy, but we didn’t believe just how much until we had the means of seeing it on a gauge like we now have. It ties in exactly with the sort of questions you ask in your articles: How is the world going to cope? What decisions are policy makers making? What choices will people need to make – or unfortunately be forced on them? And as you say, what’s the future the kids are inheriting?