76 More feel-good power

That bit of rain was to remind us how nice the past had been to us. The present and future was back to dry. Surprisingly the price of electricity started to rise and the blame was placed squarely on the drought. Apparently conventional coal-fired and gas power stations need lots of water for cooling purposes and steam generation. Nuclear power stations are very hungry for water too but not as hungry as our green Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric scheme. It was pretty clear that as well as the price of power rising, it was going to become increasingly scarce in proportion to rainfall.

We decided to do something that we had talked about for years, we would go solar. Solar power generation is a dry operation so should remain reliable despite the drought. What stimulated us was that the government, operating through the Australian National Greenhouse Office, would provide $8000 towards a solar electricity installation at any property occupied by the owner. In effect this grant would be half the price of a 1 kW grid-connect system. A 1 kw system at our latitude provides about 1800 kwh per year, so averaging 5 kwh per day. This would be half requirements when all the freezers were running, but that applied for only two months, and cover all our use allowing for one freezer. Grid-connect means you take power out of the grid when you don’t have enough and feed back when you have too much. You don’t need batteries.
We worked out that we would pay off the system through savings on electricity use in about nine years, but if electricity prices doubled in the short term as forecast, payback time would be under five years. There were also rumours that uploads to the grid were soon to be paid out at twice downloads, making payback time only 3 years. Everything was working in the right direction. The feel good issue about being greenhouse neutral was additional. According to the suppliers, the panels themselves became greenhouse neutral after just three months of electricity generation.

She decided to do the same at her house in Canberra, using a different contractor so we could compare approaches, but the overall cost should be about the same. In Canberra they put the panels on the house roof because there they were not shaded by trees. Roof installation was cheaper than my free-standing system so for our decided price they could use different and more panels. The consequence was that she won the solar grid-connect competition because her system generated 22% more than mine and more than covered all her use. Together for the two dwellings we were producing all our electricity by solar. Theoretically we wouldn’t have any electricity bills for the rest of our lives.