Townsville – Beautiful One Day, Battery Powered Economy The Next? – Image: ROxBo, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
A consortium has inked an agreement with Queensland’s Townsville City Council to investigate the viability of constructing of a huge battery manufacturing facility capable of churning out one million home batteries annually.
Australian battery company DCS are making wild claims about their battery.
Power is boring.
But the struggle to obtain it? That is interesting.
In 10 year’s time powering homes with batteries may be so commonplace it will be boring.
But at the moment it’s not so dull. [Read more…]
If your house is getting too hot should you invest in heat reflective paint or solar panels?
It can get bloody hot in summer thanks to the sun blazing down on our roofs and making them hot enough to not only fry an egg, but some bacon as well.
This post is about stopping the summer sun heating your roof, turning your home into a metaphorical oven. [Read more…]
Unless your local electricity network provides a local variation to a new Australian Standard that becomes mandatory on Thursday, it may be illegal to install a Powerwall 2 plus solar on a single phase. [Read more…]
Tindo Solar is now owned by SA company ‘Cool or Cosy’.
Tindo Solar, Australia’s only manufacturer of Solar panels has been bought by South Australia’s insulation, solar installation, and energy efficiency company Cool or Cosy.
The deal was announced on… Well actually, it hasn’t been announced yet1. But since I’m from Queensland, obviously I know Julian Assange, so you can trust me to know all the secrets. [Read more…]
I think fossil fuels are great. [Read more…]
The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition should be a really useful tool for solar buyers. Unfortunately it isn’t.
The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, or SVTC to its friends, is an organisation that has been working hard for over 32 years to protect this life encrusted blob of nickel and iron spinning in space that we call Earth.
SVTC campaigns to promote both safe environmental practices and ethical behavior in high tech industries. Each year since 2009 they have released a report called the SVTC Solar Scorecard that ranks solar panel manufacturers on both their environmental sustainability and ethical behavior. [Read more…]
It has become fashionable to refer to 2016 as a horrible year. An annus horribilis.
If your personal annus has been horribilis, then you have my condolences. But I think, for most of the world’s population, it has actually been a pretty good year. An annus prettigoodis if you will. [Read more…]
Thinking of getting a Powerwall 2 and taking yourself off grid? Then you need to read this first.
Note from Finn:
Since this post was published Tesla have canned the DC Powerwall 2 in Australia. We will now only be able to get an AC Powerwall 2. A regular AC coupled battery is no good for off grid because it can’t talk to the solar inverter to balance energy demand and supply. So if you live in Australia and want to go off grid do not use a Powerwall 2.
A long time ago, back in the days before we knew how lame the original Powerwall was compared to its hype or how good the Powerwall 2’s hype is compared to the original Powerwall, I wrote about whether or not my parents in sub-tropical Queensland could save money by going off-grid using lead-acid battery storage.
My conclusion was they could not save money even under almost ideal circumstances. The benefit of staying on-grid and receiving even a low feed-in tariff for surplus solar electricity was too great to make saying sayonara to the grid connection wire worthwhile. [Read more…]
As soon as a battery manufacturer says this, your battery magically gets a 20 year warranty in Australia. No matter what the warranty document says.
The other day a salesperson give me the rundown on a home battery system he had on display. While it wasn’t cheap, it certainly appeared to be a very impressive piece of technology. The salesperson clearly had a lot of confidence in it because, even though its written warranty was only for 10 years, he very generously doubled that to a 20 year warranty without batting an eyelid.
Ben Affleck would bat his eyelids for two hours a day in preparation for this role.
We weren’t related, so nepotism wasn’t the reason for his generosity. And it wasn’t because I saved his life in Nam…bour. (That sugar cane train could be really dangerous.) We weren’t old schoolmates, and as hard as it may be to believe, he wasn’t taken in by my charm and good looks.
No, the reason why he gave me a 20 year warranty was simply because he didn’t realize he was giving one. Or possibly, he did realize he was giving one and really hates his company.
He gave me a 20 year warranty when he told me the battery system had a design life of 20 years. According to Australian Consumer Law, if a salesperson makes a statement that a reasonable person would conclude to mean that a product can be expected to last for 20 years, then that counts as a 20 year warranty. It doesn’t matter that this warranty was given verbally or that it is twice as long as its written warranty, legally it still counts. [Read more…]
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