Previous Updates - The Greeny Flat Experience

Nov 15, 2015: Battery Storage Options

In last week’s Newsletter I wrote about the approaching battery storage revolution and whether or not we are likely to see a big percentage of homeowners go ‘off-the-grid’. Personally I think this is unlikely but it will depend on how electricity companies adapt to the fundamental changes that solar + storage are bringing to the way people produce, use, buy, sell, and think about energy.

New Energy Storage Options

Just in the last week I’ve read about a couple more interesting energy storage options.

This Gizmag article describes a new program from Daimler in Germany whereby they plan to combine a lot of used electric car batteries into a 13MWh energy storage facility. Batteries are good for about 10 years in electric cars until they can no longer produce the power output that a car requires, however they still have a lot of useful life left in them. In fact Daimler estimates that they should be good for another ten years of stationary battery storage. This should help to reduce the cost of stationary storage plus reduce the environmental effects of making, using and recycling huge numbers of batteries.

Meanwhile, for those readers who are keen to get started with energy storage and don’t want to wait until the Tesla Powerwall arrives in Australia, the latest issue of ReNew magazine included a short piece about LG’s Residential Energy Storage Unit (RESU) which seems to compare favourably with the Powerwall in terms of size, capacity, convenience and cost. These lithium ion battery systems are available now from Solar Juice with a RRP of $6900.

Fossil Fuel Subsidies

On the other hand, the world’s governments continue to subsidise fossil fuels even while they talk about reducing carbon emissions. This excellent article from Energy Matters describes the massive contradictions at play in government policies that support the global fossil fuel industry to the tune of about US$200 Billion annually.

‘We are totally schizophrenic,” said Secretary-General Gurria in other comments related to the report. “We are trying to reduce emissions and we subsidise the consumption of fossil fuels’ which causes global warming…

These policies are now obsolete – dangerous legacies of a bygone era when pollution was viewed as a tolerable side effect of economic growth…

In addition to environmental issues, fossil-fuel subsidies distort the costs and prices of various goods and services; perpetuating older technologies over cleaner alternatives such as renewable energy and the continuation of energy-intensive methods of production.’

Personally I am very hopeful that we will see big changes in the global energy sector over the next few years which will level the playing field and help renewable energy to gain the upper hand over fossil fuels. I hope to see a global emissions trading scheme come out of the upcoming climate talks in Paris. I hope to see a lot of marginal fossil fuel companies go broke due to the artificially low energy prices we are currently experiencing. Plus I hope to see governments around the world reducing subsidies for fossil fuels. All of these factors will help to drive the price of fossil fuels much higher which will help to make renewable energy more competitive and when that happens we will really see a huge shift away from fossil fuels and into renewables.

Oct 8, 2015: The Big Disconnect?

Will the battery storage revolution take us all off the grid?

Since I wrote about Tesla’s announcement of the release of its battery storage system called the ‘Powerwall‘ back in our May 3rd Newsletter I’ve had countless people ask me what I think about battery storage for solar power systems and how soon we will be able to all go ‘off the grid’. Let me be clear from the outset, I think the future lies in being connected to the grid, not off the grid, and I will explain why.

Off Grid is not Cost Effective

If your house is already connected to mains electricity (or if you live close to the grid) it simply doesn’t make economic sense to go off the grid. At the Greeny Flat, our entire energy bill for our first year was $258. A single Powerwall is likely to cost $8,000 or more installed. So even one Powerwall were capable of taking us off grid, it would take about 31 years to recoup the cost. Meanwhile it will be warranted for 10 years…. so the numbers don’t even come close to stacking up for us. The payback time would be shorter for houses with bigger power bills but they would likely need two or three Powerwalls to meet their power requirements so it still isn’t cost effective.

The only scenario I can foresee in which battery storage will make financial sense is if we are all able to trade power at the spot price through a connection to the grid. There is a company in the ACT called Reposit Power which is in the early stages of rolling out a new kind of software that allows homeowners to trade electricity on the grid. As this Ecogeneration article puts it;

‘Reposit Power’s solution includes the ‘GridCredits’ technology, which automatically decides on behalf of households throughout the day whether to store energy in a battery or sell it back to the grid at a profit i.e. it buys energy when prices are low and sells energy when prices are high to make a profit for consumers.’

If you combine this software with a solar system and battery storage there is real potential for households to not only generate more energy than they use, but to also profit from their investment in solar power. I think this will be the way of the future but it requires homes to be connected to the grid in order to work.

Check out this Gizmag article about the Enphase Home Energy Solution which sounds like it’s already a number of steps beyond the Powerwall before the latter has even been released here.

‘Enphase is billed as the world’s first integrated system that allows home users to store, monitor and manage their rooftop-generated solar electricity, while controlling their overall electricity consumption.’

The Enphase system is scheduled to be released in Australia first under a pilot program to begin in December this year. The Gizmag article quotes a price of ‘AUD$1,150 per kilowatt hour for volume purchases by direct customers in the Australian market, with a margin to be applied by partners’. It will be very interesting to see how much it actually costs us homeowners once the ‘partners’ have applied their ‘margin’ but Enphase is just one of many companies that will be competing with Tesla for the battery storage market so I think we will see prices come down rapidly.

Off Grid is not Environmentally Responsible

If you have the ability to connect to the grid it makes much better environmental sense not to go off grid for a number of reasons.

Firstly, an off grid system needs to be oversized. Because an off grid system doesn’t have the ability to use the grid as a backup for times when energy use is high and energy production is low (e.g. consecutive days of cloudy weather), it has to be about three times larger than would be required to make the same house energy positive on a grid connected system. On a grid-tied system you can size the solar system to meet the home’s annual consumption and use grid power to compensate for the times of high load/low production. The smaller size of the grid-tied system makes it a much better environmental choice.

Secondly, grid-tied solar systems can help to compensate for regional fluctuations in renewable energy production. If every home has a solar system and is connected to the national electricity grid we have the ability to shift power from one region to another. So, if the Southern Highlands is cloudy, we can ‘borrow’ power from Dubbo where the sun is shining, and vice versa. This would help to make renewable energy a more effective solution for the entire country, thereby reducing our dependence on fossil-fuel-produced power.

Thirdly, grid-tied solar systems with battery storage and interactive connection to a ‘smart’ grid have the potential to help the whole country be powered by renewable energy. We are blessed with abundant sunshine, wind, wave, tidal, hydro and geothermal energy. As we learn how to better harvest those renewable energy sources, how to reduce our energy requirements, and how to better manage the way we trade and transmit power via the grid we can start to conceive of a future where we don’t need to keep burning fossil fuels.

We Need the Energy Companies to Co-operate

As I mentioned above, I think grid-tied solar systems with battery storage and interactive connection to a smart grid will be the way of the future. Unfortunately the big energy companies have not yet come to the party but they will. As soon as battery storage systems become an economically viable option we will start to see a significant number of people choosing to disconnect from the grid. When that happens we will see the energy providers do a backflip and actively embrace solar with storage.

Meanwhile there is delicious irony in this Energy Matters post which quotes Paul Adams, the managing director of Jemena (a Chinese/Singaporean company which owns $9 Billion worth of energy and water infrastructure in Australia) as saying that going off the grid is ‘greedy and selfish’.

‘The grid is of so much value here, why don’t you want to share your energy with your neighbours?… Why don’t you want to do something on a community and social basis, why are you so greedy and selfish?’

I happen to agree with him but the irony is, of course, that the main reason people want to disconnect from the grid is to free themselves from the greed and selfishness of companies like Jemena who keep jacking up their electricity bills and reducing their solar feed in tariffs.

I doubt that his argument will convince too many people to stay connected to the grid but I think we’ll see a big shift in the financial incentive towards being grid connected with battery storage in the near future.

And We Need Governments to Stop Subsidising Fossil Fuels and Start Pricing Carbon

The other thing that has the potential to dramatically shift the balance in favour of renewable energy is the price of fossil fuels and carbon. Right now we’re suffering from ridiculously low oil and coal prices because of global over-supply. This is therefore the perfect time for the world’s governments to stop subsidising fossil fuel production. According to this Energy Matters post;

‘The OECD Inventory of Support Measures for Fossil Fuels 2015 shows governments are spending almost double the amount supporting fossil fuels – USD $160-200bn annually – as is needed to meet the climate-finance objectives set by the international community…

“These policies are now obsolete – dangerous legacies of a bygone era when pollution was viewed as a tolerable side effect of economic growth.”

“We are totally schizophrenic,” said Secretary-General Gurria in other comments related to the report. “We are trying to reduce emissions and we subsidise the consumption of fossil fuels’ which causes global warming.”

The OECD says current lower oil prices present a golden opportunity for governments to phase out support for the consumption and production of fossil fuels.’

Another golden opportunity for things to shift in the right direction is coming up at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris in December. There are strong indications that the US and China will push for a global agreement on reducing climate emissions and I have high hopes that we might see a global emissions trading scheme after the Paris talks.

If governments around the world stopped subsiding fossil fuels and started taxing carbon emissions we would see the price of fossil fuel energy increase dramatically compared to renewable energy and that would be the biggest incentive or all for more people to choose renewables. I just happen to think that the smart way to do that will be to stay connected to the grid and to use solar power with battery storage to get maximum efficiency out of our household, community and national energy systems.

Nov 11, 2015: 7,377,870,064 Elephants in the Room

image courtesy of troopytracks.com

In our June 28th Newsletter article I wrote that I was glad Pope Francis had spoken out against climate change but disappointed that he hadn’t said anything about population growth. This prompted a surprising and troubling response from a very dear friend of mine who came close to accusing me of being in favour of genocide and infanticide. I replied that, no, I’m not in favour of genocide or infanticide. I simply don’t believe human life on the planet can survive unless something is done to curb our population growth and I am in favour of education and birth control. Unfortunately I haven’t heard back from my friend and I’m afraid that one brief mention of the word ‘population’ may have cost me a lifelong friend. So I can begin to understand why no politician, business or religious leader seems prepared to raise the issue and why we are left with 7.4 Billion elephants in the room.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the phrase ‘the elephant in the room’ and found some interesting things. This Wikipedia page cites the origin of the idiom as being: ‘In 1814, Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769-1844), poet and fabulist… wrote a fable entitled “The Inquisitive Man” which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant.’ The phrase has come to mean ‘an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed…. an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss’. This seems perfectly appropriate to the issue of global population, especially as the Wikipedia article goes on to state that ‘the idiom is commonly used in addiction recovery terminology to describe the reluctance of friends and family of an addicted person to discuss the person’s problem, thus aiding the person’s denial.’

It seems glaringly obvious to me that continued growth in the number of people on the planet is going to, at some point (if it hasn’t already), mean that we don’t have enough resources to feed, clothe, shelter, and provide a decent life for everyone. So why is NOBODY talking about it? Personally I think it’s because we’ve all been brainwashed into believing that growth is good for us. It seems to me that you cannot read anything about politics, business or human endeavour without the word ‘growth’ being used with the implied understanding that it is what we want. We have become addicted to growth and we are happy to deny that we have a problem and to ignore the elephant in the room.

Perpetual Growth = Cancer

We are labouring under a global economic system that is founded on the principle that ‘Growth is Good’. This founding principle requires perpetual growth in every measure of economic achievement. There is no question that this philosophy has led to an unprecedented spurt of technological and scientific endeavour, but at what point do we stop to question whether this is beneficial? Has all this economic growth actually made our lives any better? Has it been worth the cost in terms of human suffering and damage to the planet? I wonder what an aboriginal elder would have to say on the subject. Indigenous people all around the world seem to have a deep understanding of the need to nurture the earth that nurtures us. So what do they think about perpetual growth? To me it looks a lot like cancer… it grows and grows, gradually consuming, and eventually killing, its host. Are we on the same path?

When you think it through, the only way we can continue to ‘grow’ the global economy is by encouraging more and more people to consume more and more resources. I think this is why population growth is such a taboo subject… it lies at the heart of a belief that pervades every government, nation, religion and business in the world… the belief that ‘growth is good’. The addiction will only end when the resources run out unless we voluntarily, and globally, decide to change the system.

From ‘Growth’ to ‘Balance’

This economic paradigm of perpetual growth is killing the planet. I strongly believe that we need to change the goal from ‘growth’ to ‘balance’. Can you imagine a global economic system that strives for balance? For a start we would have to figure out how many people the planet can sustainably support. Then we’d have to find a way to more fairly distribute the available, sustainable, renewable resources to ensure that everyone has a decent quality of life. These thoughts would not sit well with the people and institutions that run the current system and who, not coincidentally, gain the most from it. I may well be crucified for uttering such blasphemy in the face of an economic and political system for which growth is god but we have these 7.4 Billion elephants in the room and I think it’s time someone mentioned it.

Of course I’m not the first to do so… there are all sorts of people out on the fringes, shouting from the hills that we have to consider the limits to global population growth. But no-one in the middle of things, no-one at the centre of the global stage, seems willing to risk putting their hand up and saying, ‘there is a huge problem looming and we had better take a long, hard look at it.’

‘Short of Workers and Consumers, China Abandons One Child Policy’

The above headline led an article that appeared in Bloomberg Business just two days ago. The article opens with the following paragraph (emphasis mine);

‘China ended one of the most ambitious demographic experiments in human history, abandoning the limit of one child for most families to foster the population growth required by the world’s second-biggest economy.’

Well, that pretty much says it all but, in explanation for why they are abandoning the one-child policy, it adds ‘the baby limit now threatens to undermine growth’. I am in no position to pass judgement either for or against China’s one child policy. I’m simply using this article to illustrate my point that population growth is intimately connected, in economist’s and politician’s minds, to economic prosperity.

Ironically, the same article also states that, ‘after decades of discouraging people from having children, the challenge is changing the mindset of potential parents worried about the costs of expanding their families‘. Doesn’t that raise the question of who benefits from the ‘economic prosperity’ brought on by population growth? Surely the answer is that government and big business benefit and working families are left to bear the cost… yet again. I wouldn’t be surprised if, instead of allowing people to have two children, the Chinese government actually made it compulsory. It might be the only way they can get their ‘workers and consumers’ to accept the additional cost and achieve the ‘growth’ they so fervently believe in.

While I’m at it, is anyone else bothered by the fact that citizens of a country are seldom referred to as people any more? More often than not these days, we, the people, are called ‘consumers’ by politicians and the media. This clearly illustrates our position and purpose in society. We are valued most highly for how much we consume.

I apologise if any of the above offends anyone’s religious, economic or political sensibilities. It is certainly not my intention to offend, simply to ask the question, ‘Can the human race afford perpetual population growth?’ If not, then clearly the direction in which we are headed is unsustainable and will lead to untold hardship and misery at some point in the future. Perhaps there are ways that we can prevent an impending catastrophe but, like any addict, the road to recovery can only begin if we are willing to admit that we have a problem. Denying climate change or pretending that population growth is not an issue looks, to me, a lot like we’re ignoring the many elephant(s) in the room.

Oct 25, 2015: Pros and Cons of Granny Flats

Hello again and thank you very much to all the readers who sent congratulatory messages following our Green Globe Award announcement last week. So far the award hasn’t led to anything too exciting but you’ll be the first to know if and when that changes. Meanwhile we keep plugging away.

This week I’ll be presenting at the ‘Southern Highlands Investment Summit‘ to be held at Peppers Craigieburn Hotel on Thursday, Oct 29th. This full-day event has been organised by the Wingecarribee Shire Council as part of their ‘Fit For the Future’ planning process. ‘The Investment Summit is an opportunity for investors to partner with Sector Groups and support specific projects.’ I will be presenting on behalf of the ‘Shelter’ Sector Group. I will very briefly explain why we need affordable, adaptable, sustainable buildings; the benefits of a home like the Greeny Flat; and a number of ways these opportunities and benefits can translate into economic development opportunities in our local area. Anyone is welcome to attend and you can register via the link above.

The Cases For and Against Granny Flats

Last week I had some interesting correspondence with a reader/architect who is also investigating ways to develop a business designing and building small, affordable, sustainable homes.

I sent her this article from ‘Domain’ entitled ‘The Rise and Rise of the Granny Flat’. While it is fairly specific to the current situation in Western Australia, much of it is also relevant to us here in the East. The article outlines some of the reasons granny flats are becoming so popular, one of which is for elderly family members.

‘With accommodation bonds for aged care facilities starting at about $50,000 and topping $800,000 in some extreme cases, Mr Nicholls said he believed granny flats, in conjunction with assisted living arrangements, were becoming a popular option for families.

In 2011, most Australians aged over 65 years old lived in a private house with a husband, wife or partner, according to census data released in April.

Strikingly, only 26 per cent of people aged 85 years and over lived in aged care facilities or retirement villages, which had dropped from 39 per cent in 1999.’

I was fascinated to read that there is such a low percentage of elderly people living in aged care facilities and even more amazed that the percentage has gone down so much since 1999. But there are other reasons people are building granny flats including as accommodation for young family members starting out and as rental properties. The rental situation is about to change in WA where, I was also amazed to read, you cannot rent out a granny flat, only a direct family member can live in one… not even a carer is allowed to use one. The article points out that the imminent relaxing of these rules is likely to spur a stampede in granny flat building.

In response to this article, my friend sent me one with an opposing view of granny flats. This article from ‘propertyupdate.com.au’ lists the pros and cons of granny flats and concludes that ‘while you may increase your rent and turn your property investment from negatively geared to giving some positive cash flow, for mine if you’ve got $100,000 or so to spend on a granny flat you could generate a much better return by putting it towards an “investment grade” property.’

These are all good things to consider when contemplating whether or not to build a granny flat. To my way of thinking, the thing that makes granny flats financially attractive is the fact that the land is already paid for. If you have a vacant back yard with good access you can potentially spend $150,000 to build a small house that you can rent out for at least $300/week in this area (probably more in Sydney). That makes a gross return of about $15,000/yr or around 10%. Obviously there will be some expenses to deduct from that so the net return will be less but it’s still a pretty interesting option in the current low-interest rate environment. But there is certainly cause to consider whether a $150,000 investment will add $150,000 to the total value of the property. There is much to ponder.

None of the above is intended as financial advice so please consult your own financial and real estate advisers if you are considering building a granny flat.

A Glimpse of the Future?

Carbon-fibre, 3D-printed, power-sharing, vacuum-insulated house and car.

Carbon-fibre, 3D-printed, wireless power-sharing, vacuum-insulated house and electric hybrid car.

This week I also came across this intriguing article on Gizmag about a recent project at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This US Department of Energy research project involved building a 3D printed house and car that share energy generation and storage capabilities. The house has solar panels on the roof (and battery storage) while the hybrid vehicle has a gas-powered generator (and battery storage). So, during the day the house generates power from the solar panels and stores it in its batteries. If the car is out on the road it can draw power from either its batteries or its generator. When the car is at home, it automatically communicates with the house and the two can share their power generation and storage capabilities. The house can draw power from the car batteries; the car can charge its batteries from the house’s solar panels; the house can also call on the car’s generator for extra power when the batteries are low; or the house can use the car’s generator to charge its batteries. This makes for a fascinating concept, especially because the house and car connect with each other and share power via a ‘wireless transfer system’. I can’t quite fathom how they can share power wirelessly but the article claims the system is ‘roughly around 85 percent’ efficient. I’m also not sure why they wouldn’t just use some sort of plug-in connection that would be roughly around 100% efficient but, in general, it sounds like they’ve been having a wonderful time trying to dream up a better future…

‘In the AMIE demonstration project, we are trying to illustrate what our future might look like if we shared our energy streams for buildings and transportation, using additive manufacturing as a tool to drive rapid innovation,’ ORNL’s Roderick Jackson, who led the AMIE demonstration project, told Gizmag. ‘The challenges we face can’t wait for the innovation cycles that currently exist for our buildings and vehicles energy ecosystem. These challenges include electricity outages caused by extreme weather events, energy poverty around the globe, and intermittent renewable generation.’

I recommend watching the video at the end of the article. It’s thought-provoking stuff. I think I would enjoy a job at the ORNL, spending vast amounts of tax-payer’s money on cutting-edge research and development. I’m also particularly interested in the wall panels for the house which the article describes as ‘cost-effective vacuum insulated panels’…

‘One of the interesting energy saving features is novel modified atmosphere insulation (MAI) panels developed by NanoPore that are about seven times more energy efficient than traditional wall insulation…’ They are 3D-printed using ‘Carbon fiber-reinforced ABS plastic composite material’… sounds pretty expensive to me… time will tell whether this really is ‘cost-effective’ and whether it becomes one of the building materials of the future.

3D Print a House in a Day

While on the subject of 3D-printed houses, the ORNL house was printed in pre-fabricated sections that were put together on site. But what if you could simply print your whole house on site… in one day! That’s exactly the concept that this article from realestate.com.au describes. Under development at the University of Southern California, this kind of technology could rapidly and fundamentally change the way we design and build homes and other buildings.

University of Southern California’s on-site 3D home printer.

The one thing about this article that really got under my skin was the part where they discussed the possibility of using this technology to print buildings on Mars. Don’t even get me started on why I think this whole push to colonise Mars is complete and utter insanity. This Newsletter is long enough already, I’ll have to leave that particular rant for another day…. stay tuned.

Oct 16, 2015: Greeny Flat Wins Green Globe Award!

Andy accepts the Green Globe award for ‘Excellence in Sustainability – Residential Projects’.

We were greatly honoured last night to receive a Green Globe Award from the NSW Government. Now in their 16th year, the Green Globes are awarded for ‘Excellence in Sustainability’ in sixteen different categories. This year was the first time they included a ‘Residential Projects’ category and we were lucky enough to win it for the Greeny Flat.

Andy and Jane with the award trophy.

In Good Company

This year’s award winners included the Sydney Opera House (for their social sustainability efforts), Sydney City Council (for their Zero Waste Program), Unilever Australia (who succeeded in recycling 100% of their non-hazardous waste last year) and Austral Bricks (for their research into using landfill gas and other waste products in their brickmaking process). There were four winners in our region including the Greeny Flat, Repower Shoalhaven (for their community energy program), the University of Wollongong (for long-term sustainability efforts) and Stocklands Shellharbour (for the largest rooftop solar array in Australia).

While it was very gratifying and humbling to be recognised in such lofty company, we did not enter the awards because we wanted recognition for what we have achieved. We entered because we are excited about what we might be able to achieve. I have to say that the encouragement we received during the gathering after the award ceremony gives me hope that great things are possible.

It’s a good thing they didn’t allow acceptance speeches last night because I might have given the whole audience a bit of an ear-bashing. I might have said that, while we’re here congratulating ourselves on how clever and good we are, there are serious problems with Australia’s energy policy, building regulations and development planning. Study after study has shown that we are among the worst polluters in the world, that we have some of the worst traffic congestion, that we are building the biggest (and among the most unaffordable and unsustainable) homes in the world, etc, etc. We are squandering our resources, our economic prosperity and our children’s future. Why? We have a country blessed with natural resources and abundant sunshine, wind and ocean energy. We could be leading the world in resource and energy conservation and renewable energy development. Instead we’re leading the world in consumption and environmental degradation.

To me, this demonstrates a complete failure at all levels of government, community and business leadership. Yes, there are many good people doing good things (as evidenced by the awards last night) but we are not doing enough and we are falling further and further behind the rest of the world.

The Greeny Flat is nothing special. The only innovative or revolutionary thing about the it is that we just did it. We simply wanted to show that it is relatively easy and affordable to build an energy positive, water-conserving, low-maintenance, fire-resistant, elderly-friendly, comfortable, healthy and sustainable home. There is no reason why every new home in Australia couldn’t be built to a similar standard. Instead of building the largest homes in the world we could be building somewhat smaller homes that are among the most energy and water efficient. It would cost no more in the short-term and it would lead to huge savings over the long-run. It also wouldn’t cost jobs or lead to economic disaster, it would simply shift more jobs into energy conservation and renewables and it would lead to research, development and innovation in new technologies, materials and systems that could open up global markets for Australian ingenuity and industry.

Michael Mobbs (of ‘The Sustainable House’ fame) tells me we should be focussing on retrofitting the existing building stock, but I disagree. I think we have to fix the new houses first otherwise we’ll have to go back and retrofit them in ten years or so. The current standards for houses in Australia in terms of resource and energy conservation are absolutely appalling. It is a national disgrace that we are allowing the sort of homes that are sprouting up by the thousands in places like Oran Park and Shell Cove. They’re held up as the ‘Australian Dream’ but these are global energy and environmental nightmares. Families are lured into unprecedented levels of debt to build homes that will cost them a fortune to run in a future that will inevitably include some sort of price on carbon emissions. We have to fix the homes we’re building today so that they don’t become an overwhelming problem tomorrow. Once we get the new homes right we can afford to focus on bringing the old ones up to speed, meanwhile they’re not going anywhere.

I was asked a question last night about how we can encourage developers and project home builders to voluntarily lift their game. Unfortunately I don’t think they will. We’re in a housing boom and they are selling their crappy products as fast as they can and making money hand over foot. What possible incentive is there for them to change anything? I think change will have to be forced on them with a carrot and a stick.

Which Comes First, the Supply or the Demand?

The carrot would be cultivated by fostering demand for energy and water conserving buildings (all of this applies to commercial buildings as much as to homes). Right now, if you ask a project home builder why they don’t offer a truly energy efficient option, they will tell you that nobody wants it, nobody asks for it… there’s no demand. Why is there no demand? I think it’s because most people have no idea of what’s possible. Which is why we built the Greeny Flat, but we need hundreds of affordable, energy positive, adaptable examples for people to get to know what their options are. Currently people go to Display Villages where they see fifty shades of grey versions of the same McMansion rubbish. To counter that we need a series of Eco-home display villages (along the lines of this concept I presented in a previous Newsletter) where they can see fifty types of sustainable alternatives. Currently, people watch shows like ‘The Block’ and ‘Grand Designs’ and develop grandiose ideas of what they need in their homes. I’d like to make a TV show called ‘Green Designs’ that focusses on the benefits of small, simple, practical, affordable, sustainable solutions. In short we could encourage change by fostering demand. If customers were fronting up to the big builders and demanding better homes the builders would be forced to supply them.

The stick, of course, would be regulatory. There is no reason why every new home in Australia couldn’t be energy positive. If that were mandated it would force designers, builders and buyers to look towards smaller and much more sensible housing options. The UK was on track to a mandate that required all new homes to be carbon-neutral by 2016. Unfortunately that recently got derailed but, if they could even consider it in cold and gloomy England, it ought to be relatively easy to achieve in warm and sunny Oz. Some people favour incremental change through systems like BASIX but, as I also wrote about in a previous Newsletter, BASIX is a JOKE! and I don’t think incremental change is working. When I left Australia in 1992 to go and live in Montana I thought Australia was way ahead of the US in terms of building sustainability. When I returned twenty years later I was shocked to find that we had fallen way behind compared to the US, and compared to countries like Germany we had been lapped a dozen times. Incremental change is not going to get us caught up because the rest of the world continue to make big improvements ahead of us. We need a huge jump in standards or we’ll be left behind completely, struggling to fix the broken results of failed policies…..

As I said, it’s a good thing they didn’t hand me a microphone last night although it would have given me a nice opportunity to acknowledge that the Greeny Flat has been a team effort and would not be possible without a great deal of help from my parents (Jane and Martin), my brother (George) and my lovely partner (Cintia). Thank you.

Oct 11, 2015: What’s Wrong With This Picture?

The above is an ad that has been appearing regularly in our local newspaper. It describes a project home called “The Resort” with “absolutely everything your family home needs”. Apparently this “vision of elegance and grandeur… has features that will forever be a source of pleasure and happiness”. In other words, if you buy this wonderful house, you will be in a state of perpetual bliss for the rest of eternity. Sounds like heaven doesn’t it…. literally!

To me this seems like some fairly optimistic advertising even for a project home builder. But I am on a mission to change mainstream building practice in Australia so it’s important to me to try to understand what the average family wants in a home… apparently this is it.

After seeing this ad a few times I decided to visit the builder’s website and learn more about “The Resort” and wow, what a beauty it is! It features five bedrooms and five living areas… FIVE LIVING AREAS! It also has a study/guest bedroom, three and a half bathrooms and “3 or more “ garages. The website is not specific on the actual floor area of the home. It gives the dimensions as “30.2m x 21.35m” which is over 600sqm. However the layout is a U-shape and if you deduct for the courtyard in the middle the floor area seems to be around 400sqm. Here is the floor plan so you can get the full effect.

All I can say is, at 400sqm it certainly ought to have “absolutely everything your family home needs”. To put this into perspective, the two-bedroom Greeny Flat is 57sqm. That means “The Resort” is SEVEN TIMES the size of the Greeny Flat. The land the Greeny Flat is built on contains two houses and is around 750sqm in area so “The Resort” would only just fit on this entire property… that’s a lot of house! In fact, I think it explains what they mean by “Stunning Acreage Design”.

And that’s not the best of it… the most wonderful and magical thing of all is that, according to the ad, “The Resort” is also “energy efficient and environmentally sustainable”. See for yourself, it’s there in black and white so it must be true.

Well, I’m sold… where do I sign up. The only thing left for me to do is to go and visit the display home in Renwick (not far from the Greeny Flat) and find out exactly how the layout of this glorious edifice “ensures energy efficiency and environmentally sustainable living”. It must be a one heck of a layout. While I’m there I’ll see if they can tell me what exactly is energy efficient and sustainable about this enormous monstrosity.

I can’t wait to hear what they have to say… I’ll keep you posted.

Sep 27, 2015: Build Tight, Vent Right

I got a nice email this week from the Alternative Technology Association (ATA) thanking us for participating in Sustainable House Day (which they organised).

‘A big thank you to everyone who turned out for Sustainable House Day on September 13! It was a wonderful day with over 15,000 visitors at the 150 homes and gardens. Initial survey feedback shows that the day has had an impact, with over 30% of attendees having already taken action to make their homes more sustainable.’

One of the people who came to the Greeny Flat on the day also sent me a link to this interesting article about the need for a mandatory air-tightness standard for buildings in Australia. The article makes some very valid points about the draftiness of Australian buildings, including the following:

‘There is a definite need to update Australian mentality around air leakage, as we are stuck in the last century. I am disappointed by how often in Australia I’ve heard the old adage, “Buildings need to breathe.” This is not true.

People need to breathe, and buildings need to control moisture. We need to replace the old sayings with “build tight and ventilate right”.’

Build Tight, Vent Right

Regular readers or our Newsletter and website will be familiar with this adage as I use it often. It succinctly sums up the two important criteria for creating buildings that are not only energy efficient but also safe, healthy, comfortable, and durable.

‘Built Tight’ means excellent air-sealing and insulation. These are the obvious things to do to make a building energy efficient. Clearly a drafty building with little or no insulation is likely to require a LOT of energy to heat and cool. What many people (including most architects and builders in Australia) don’t realise is that these two have to work together. You can have all the insulation in the world but if your building is drafty the insulation won’t do any good. (Imagine being out in a blizzard wrapped in a thick woolen blanket with lots of holes in it… it’s not going to keep you warm). Similarly, the best air-sealing is no good without insulation (image being in a blizzard wrapped only in a tightly sealed garbage bag… it won’t keep you warm either and you’ll likely die of asphyxiation before you die of cold). So you need BOTH good insulation and good air-sealing for energy efficiency.

Testing the air-tightness of the Greeny Flat with a Blower Door Test

BUT (and it’s a big but) we have to remember to ‘Vent Right’ as well. In a well-sealed building it becomes essential to provide adequate ventilation in order to control humidity, reduce the risk of mould, provide fresh air and remove pollutants and odours. I go into this in more detail in our section on ventilation which is one of a set of principles that make for excellent Passive Solar Design. The point I want to make here is that, if you only focus on air-sealing and insulation without providing good ventilation, you can easily create an indoor environment that is unsafe, unhealthy, uncomfortable and quite possibly toxic. This is what has come to be known as ‘Sick Building Syndrome‘.

Which brings me back to the problem I have with the article mentioned above… it’s all very well to advocate for an air-tightness standard for Australian buildings and for mandatory air-tightness testing, but ONLY if we advocate for a mandatory ventilation standard as well.

When I was living in Montana a few years ago the state government passed a law requiring that all new residential buildings had to be Blower Door Tested for air-tightness and could not exceed 4 ACH50. (ACH50 is a common measurement of building air-tightness and stands for ‘Air Changes Per House at Minus 50 Pascals’. An extremely air-tight building might have an ACH50 of less than one and an extremely drafty building might have an ACH50 of over 20). Suffice to say that 4ACH50 is fairly air tight… The problem was that the Montana government didn’t pass any law requiring that buildings had to also be properly ventilated. So we had a situation where builders were creating very air-tight buildings (in some cases much tighter than the required 4 ACH50) and were not providing any controlled ventilation. I left Montana soon after this took effect so I don’t know what the outcome has been but it seemed to me that the government had created a huge time-bomb with the very real potential to make a lot of people sick and even to kill people.

So Why Not Just Open a Window?

A lot of people think that the way to ventilate a house is to simply open a window. It’s true that you can get plenty of fresh air by doing that and it can go a long way towards keeping a building healthy, safe and durable. Unfortunately it can also negate any effort to make the building energy efficient and comfortable. If you open windows in the winter you let the warm air out and cold air in and the building will require a lot more energy to keep the interior comfortable.

So How Can We Get Fresh Air Without Losing Heat?

The best way is by using a Heat Recovery Ventilation (HRV) System. We didn’t do that in the Greeny Flat because HRV’s were pretty hard to find in Australia when we were planning the project. Instead, we use exhaust ventilation in combination with an earth-tempering tube on the fresh air intake. You can read more about this system and about HRV’s on our ventilation page. I’ve recently learned of a business in Sydney which sells and installs HRV’s and you can visit their website at www.heatrecoverysystems.com.au.

Conclusion

If our goal is to create buildings that are safe, healthy, comfortable, durable and energy efficient we must adhere to the old saying ‘Build Tight, Vent Right’.

Sep 20, 2015: Driving Sustainability

Last Sunday was Sustainable House Day 2015. I haven’t seen the national numbers for how many homes were open and how many visitors came but we had a very enjoyable and successful day at the Greeny Flat. Just over 50 people stopped by for everything from a 10 second peek to a two hour, in-depth conversation. Everyone was very interested and interesting, we had a lot of great conversations and received a lot of very encouraging feedback. Thanks very much to everyone who came to say hello.

One of our future goals for the Greeny Flat is to get an electric car and see if we can be energy positive for both our home and transportation. At the moment there are very few choices for electric cars in Australia and they are quite (or in the case of the Tesla cars VERY) expensive. So we’re not quite ready to bite that bullet yet. The first step will probably be to get an electric assisted bicycle. In the meantime I have been accumulating interesting information about sustainable vehicles. For this weeks Newsletter I thought I would provide links to some of the things I have come across.

First Solar Car Was Built 60 Years Ago

The 1955 Sunmobile

What I would really like to have is an electric car that we could charge from our solar panels when it is parked in the garage AND that was covered with solar panels so that it could charge itself when it was on the road or parked elsewhere. It turns out that the first such car was built 60 years ago by an engineer from General Motors. Admittedly it was only 15 inches long but, according to this article from the Energy Matters blog, the first driveable solar car was built in 1962. It’s a shame that, 53 years later, we still can’t go out and buy one but some of the first road-legal solar cars might be coming from Australia in the form of the University of NSW’s ‘Sunswift‘ project and the ‘Immortus‘ solar sports car (both of which we have covered in previous Newsletters).

The Immortus solar sports car

Perovskite Solar Cells Better for Charging Vehicles on the Road

According to this Gizmag article, researchers from the Case Western Reserve University have achieved the highest solar charging efficiency rates for Lithium Ion batteries using Perovskite solar cells. The record they achieved was a not-very-impressive-sounding 7.8% which makes you think that, if they can figure out how to reach 20 or 25% (similar to the best solar cell efficiencies), then the prospects for cars that can charge themselves on the road will look very much sunnier.

Record Solar-to-Hydrogen Conversion Efficiency

On the subject of record efficiencies, researchers from Australia’s own Monash University, have achieved the highest ever rate for converting sunlight into hydrogen. According to this Gizmag article, they managed a conversion rate of 22% which is a significant step towards making hydrogen a cost-effective, alternative, renewable fuel for both car and home uses.

There was a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald which described the new hydrogen powered car from Honda as ’emission free’. I am sick to death of reading about electric and hydrogen cars as being ‘zero emission’. Sure, an electric car doesn’t have an exhaust pipe and, as Tesla are careful to state, it has ‘zero tailpipe emissions’. But the fact is that currently, most electric cars are charged from the mains electricity grid which is primarily powered by coal-fired power plants. An electric car so charged is not ‘zero emissions’, it just moves the emissions from the exhaust pipe to the Hunter Valley (or wherever your nearest power plant is located).

Rubbish… the claim not the car

Similarly, when you burn hydrogen to fuel your car, the resulting by-product is water. So a hydrogen powered car also has no tailpipe emissions. But stop for a moment to consider where the hydrogen comes from… as this Wikipedia page makes clear, Currently, the majority of hydrogen (∼95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming or partial oxidation of methane and coal gasification with only a small quantity by other routes such as biomass gasification or electrolysis of water. Read further into the article and you find that the by-products of the steam reforming process are carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, so the production of hydrogen generates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.

In the best case scenario, you can generate hydrogen by using electricity from renewable sources like hydro, solar or wind farms, to split water atoms in a process called ‘electrolysis’. In this case the actual making of the hydrogen and the eventual burning of it in your car do not directly generate polluting emissions. But you still can’t call the process ’emission free’. For starters, think about all of the emissions that were generated by the production of the car itself, the steel, the glass, the rubber, etc. And think about all the emission from the building of the power plant whether it was a massive concrete dam and a hydro power plant, a huge array of solar panels, or a row of big wind turbines… they all took a lot of energy and material to produce which generated a lot of emissions in the process. So next time you see something described as ‘zero emissions’ or ’emission free’ PLEASE stop for a moment to think about what this really means and, if you have the opportunity, point out to the person making the claim that it is, in fact, rubbish.

Hankook Claims Airless Tyres Can Be More Sustainable

For many years I lived on a ranch in Montana (see photos from my last trip in this recent Newsletter) which is located 100km from the nearest town. Half that distance was on a shale road that was hell on wheels (actually it was hell on tyres but hell on wheels sounds so much better). We spent a lot of time on the ranch fixing flat tyres which is not a fun job and I used to lie awake at night dreaming of a tyre that was made with a flexible matrix between the hub and the tread and was, therefore, puncture proof.

I should have patented the idea because, lo and behold, here it is in the form on the Hankook ‘iFlex’.

Hankook ‘iFlex’ airless tyres

They’re not in production yet but, according to this Gizmag article, not only are they puncture proof but ‘Hankook’s iFlex eschews conventional construction for a material that the company says is energy-efficient to manufacture and easy to recycle. The material also has allowed Hankook to halve the number of steps involved in manufacturing’. Given the significant environmental problems posed by the mountains of used tyres currently piling up around the world, this looks like one way that driving could become much more sustainable.

Sept 12, 2015: Greeny Flat Named 2015 Green Globe Awards Finalist

For ‘Excellence in Sustainability’, the Green Globe Awards are NSW’s leading environmental awards.

We are highly honoured and proud to announce that the Greeny Flat has been chosen as one of two finalists in the ‘Built Environments – Residential Properties’ category for the 2015 awards.

The following is a quote from a NSW Office of Environment and Heritage media release about this year’s awards…

The awards, now in their 16th year, celebrate innovative environmental achievements and resource-saving measures from businesses, government and community groups across NSW.

The 2015 award finalists, across 16 award categories, range from industry-experts, famous iconic Sydney buildings, small community groups and global brands. Their projects cover innovation, leadership, resource efficiency, sustainability and wildlife and habitat restoration.

Finalists were chosen by an independent panel of leading environmental experts in the fields of energy, water, waste, sustainability and environmental research and academia. Robin Mellon, Green Globe Award Judging Panel Chair describes the high calibre of this year’s nominations.

“It’s remarkable to see the sustained effort from not only NSW’s largest corporations but also councils, small and medium businesses and community groups in the Green Globe Award nominations this year. Nominees are now addressing sustainability across more areas of their business than ever before, with many looking at long-term visions, social and shared value, and holistic initiatives, rather than simply their short-term goals,” said Mr Mellon.

The winners will be announced at the Green Globe Awards Ceremony on Thursday, 15 October at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. The Premier’s Award for Environmental Excellence, the best-of-the-best, will be announced at the event.

To read a summary of all 43 finalists visit www.environment.nsw.gov.au/greenglobes

Being named as a finalist for this year’s awards puts the Greeny Flat in company with some major players in state, national and global sustainability efforts. Other finalists this year include multinational corporations like Ikea and Unilever; huge property developers like Lendlease and GPT Group; major Australian cities including Sydney and Newcastle; and national icons like the Sydney Opera House.

We can see it now… tourists from all over the world will be changing their itineraries… first stop – Sydney Opera House, second stop – the Greeny Flat…

Okay, maybe not, but if we win the award, we do hope that it will lend weight to our call for a major transformation of the Australian building industry. If I’m invited up to the podium on October 15th, my acceptance speech will go something like this…

‘Currently, Australians are building the largest, and some of the most unsustainable and unaffordable homes in the world.

Why?

We don’t need bigger homes than anyone else in the world. We could easily reduce the size of our homes and use the money saved to make them more energy efficient, sustainable and affordable. The Greeny Flat proves that there is no reason why every home (and most other buildings in Australia) could not be energy positive and carbon neutral. It is a relatively inexpensive and simple thing to achieve and doing so has the potential to generate a lot of jobs and economic activity with a huge payback in terms of lower operating costs, reduced carbon emissions and healthier, more liveable buildings.

But we need both government and industry to step up to the plate. We need much higher energy efficiency standards. We need sustainability to be an underlying principle of all our Building Codes and Planning Regulations. And we need the big builders like GPT and Lendlease to aggressively develop and market much more sustainable buildings than they are currently offering.’

Wish us luck! I’ll let you know how it goes.

Passive House, Active Owner (continued)

Due to a combination of jet-lag and technical difficulties, last week’s Newsletter was cut short. Below is the rest of the piece that was incomplete. Sorry for the confusion last week…

There’s an old saying in Passive Solar Design circles… ‘A passive house requires an active owner’. This means that, in order to get the greatest benefit from a passive solar designed house, the occupants need to operate the house in a logical and consistent way. For example, during the summer, the way we keep the Greeny Flat cool is by opening the windows and blinds at night to let cool air flow through the house. This lowers the temperature of the thermal mass in the concrete floor. During the day, we close all the windows and blinds to keep the heat out and the thermal mass helps to keep the interior nice and cool. As ‘active owners’ it’s up to us to remember to open and close the windows and blinds in the mornings and evenings in order for the ‘passive’ design to work optimally.

In the winter time we keep the windows closed all the time. We open the insulating blinds during the day to let the sun pour in and warm the thermal mass of the floor and close the blinds at night to help keep the heat in the house. By opening and closing the blinds at the appropriate times we were able to keep the interior relatively comfortable through our whole first winter with almost no additional heating (apart from a very small radiator we used once or twice in the bedroom). The graph below shows the difference between the indoor and outdoor temperatures during the last winter when we were here to operate the house correctly.

Graph showing the indoor and outdoor temperature fluctuations in winter at the Greeny Flat

Graph showing the indoor and outdoor temperature fluctuations in July 2014

You can see that, even though the outdoor temperature was fluctuating between 20 and -2degC the indoor temperature stayed comfortable between about 24 and 15degC.

This winter was a different story, we just got back from a six-week trip, during which time the Greeny Flat was empty and no-one was here to operate the blinds. As you can see from the second graph below, this meant that the indoor temperature was significantly lower.

Graph of indoor and outdoor temperatures in August 2015 while we were away

For security reasons we chose to leave the blinds closed while we were away which meant that the sun could not come in to warm the thermal mass of the floor during the day. So the whole house was colder both day and night. I was actually surprised that the indoor temperature didn’t get even colder than this with no sun coming into the house. As you can see from the the table on our Results Page, the lowest temperature recorded while we were gone was 10.6degC despite the outdoor temperature getting down to -3.4degC. This is testament to the value of good insulation, air-sealing and thermal mass.

Sept 6, 2015: Sustainable House Day

The Greeny Flat will be open again this year for Sustainable House Day on September 13 between 10am and 4pm. We had about 80 people come to see the Greeny Flat during last year’s Sustainable House Day(s) and we received a lot of very positive feedback. If you came last year you might like to come back and hear about our experience of living in the place for the last year and a half. The Greeny Flat has surpassed our expectations on almost all levels. We’re particularly proud of the facts that in our first full year of operation we: exported to the electricity grid nearly three-and-a-half times as much power as we imported from it; used about and-and-a-half times more tank water than town water; and had a total running cost for the year of $311.

If you couldn’t make it last year, here’s your chance to come and experience a small, affordable, comfortable, healthy, energy positive, low-maintenance, fire-resistant, water-efficient, elderly-friendly infill house. There are also a few other Sustainable House Day projects in our area. One is the Southern Highlands Welcome Centre in Mittagong which has recently undergone a sustainability upgrade incorporating energy efficiency, renewable energy and even a brand new electric car charging station. I haven’t had the tour of the upgraded facility yet so I’m hoping to find a few minutes on Sunday to head over there and see what they’re up to.

Another project in our area is one I have been to and written about in a previous Newsletter. Called ‘The Keep‘ it is a wonderful project that incorporates natural and sustainable buildings with renewable energy, permaculture gardens, aquaculture, animal husbandry, herbal medicine, and an incredible food forest. I strongly encourage anyone with an interest in sustainability, self-sufficiency, food growing and community building to take this opportunity for a visit. You’ll be glad you did.

In nearby Bowral, the Four Seasons Community Garden will also be open on the day. It’s another one I haven’t been to yet myself but it sounds like a great place to learn about all things relating to organic gardening. The only bad thing about opening the Greeny Flat for the day is that it means we can’t go around and visit all the other inspiring projects that are on offer. Anyway we hope to see you here on Sunday. If you live in a different region, chances are there are projects open in your area which you can search for on the Sustainable House Day website.

Passive House, Active Owner

There’s an old saying in Passive Solar Design circles… ‘A passive house requires an active owner’. What this means is that, in order to get the greatest benefit from a passive solar designed house, the occupants need to operate the house in a logical and consistent way. For example, during the summer, the way we keep the Greeny Flat cool is by opening the windows and blinds at night to let cool air flow through the house. This lowers the temperature of the thermal mass in the concrete floor. During the day, we close all the windows and blinds to keep the heat out and the thermal mass helps to keep the interior nice and cool. As ‘active owners’ it’s up to us to remember to open and close the windows and blinds in the mornings and evenings.