Beechworth Urban Landcare and Sustainability

Title: North East Energy Expo Location: Oxley Hall Link out: Click here Description: he North East Energy Expo will showcase a range of traditional and cutting-edge renewable and energy-saving ideas and technologies that will be of interest to both householders and farmers.

More than 20 exhibits will include everything from solar panels and solar water pumps to make-your-own biodiesel, double-glaze retrofits, earth building, waste heaters, telemetry and solar cookers, to name a few.

Plus register on the day for the Speed Date a Sustainable Designer event. Your chance to have your tricky questions answered by an expert!

There will also be packed schedule of presentations by expert speakers who will share practical and inspiring information on topics such as international energy trends, choosing solar panels or hot water systems, bioenergy, minimizing farm inputs and the energy future of our region.

Activities for the kids and food available on site. Start Time: 10:00 Date: 2012-05-20 End Time: 16:00

You can now borrow a Save Power Kit free of charge from Upper Murray Regional Library.

It’s a fun and educational way for you and your household to learn more about the power you use and how to reduce your power bills.

The Save Power Kits provide tools, information and a guidebook to help you make your home more energy efficient.

The Save Power Kits can:

• show you what uses the most power in your home, and
• give you ideas and some easy steps you can take to save money, power and reduce our impact on the environment.

Save Power Kits – borrow from your local library for more info – or contact the library!

A new solar farm able to generate enough energy for 12,000 households has just come online in the south of France.

The Les Mées solar farm in the department of Alpes-de- Haute-Provence features six Siemens photovoltaic (PV) power plants with a combined peak output of 31 megawatts. The project developer is Delta Solar, a subsidiary of Eco Delta Développement (EDD).

French solar farm to produce enough energy for 12,000 homes | Energy.

Oh great – thanks Ted!!!!!!!!!!

THE Baillieu government has quietly cut access for most households to a second incentive to install new rooftop solar panels.

It follows the decision last month to slash the state’s ”premium” feed-in tariff paid by retailers for rooftop solar from 60¢ to 25¢ a kilowatt for power fed into the grid.

Under the changes, the government will also restrict access to the state’s ”standard” feed-in tariff – in place since 2004 – for new solar panel systems generating less than five kilowatts, the lion’s share of installations.

London is gearing up for the 2012 Games and at the Olympic site a huge shopping centre will have some of its power provided by green footpaths, CNN reports.

The technology converts the kinetic energy from your footstep into electricity, which in this case will help to power half of the Stratford City mall’s outdoor lighting.

AFTER LESS THAN A year and a half in which so much energy news seemed troubling – nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, rising gas prices – it might be startling to find out that worldwide installed capacity of renewable energy has now surpassed that of nuclear power. In fact, global investment in clean energy, driven by enlightened, forward-looking national policies, grew to a record US$243 billion in 2010, up 30 per cent from the previous year.

via Who will win the clean energy race? – Opinion – ABC Environment (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

Wouldn’t it be great to have this kind of campaign here?!

Neon lights are switched off, trains are running slower and billboards flash energy savings as Japan looks to alternative sources of energy beyond nuclear power

Energy-saving ‘setsuden’ campaign sweeps Japan after Fukushima | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

by Charlie Robinson

I am living proof that good luck will always compensate for stupidity and ineptitude.  In my last article I bewailed my inability to produce even one drop of apple juice, despite a considerable investment in time, money, and expletives.  Good luck came in the guise of my inventive brother-in-law who just happened to have a pork mincer, with attached electric motor, lying around the shed (as you do).  Now, this pork mincer performs the task of apple scratting to perfection.  It looks like an over-sized meat mincer and seems custom made for the task at hand.

The quartered apples are simply shoved into the top chute and a knurled shaft forces the pieces through a sieve into the bucket at just the right consistency for pressing.  The scratted apples are then placed into the press and compressed by hardwood blocks and the juice escapes through slats into the base which then flows into another bucket.  A washing basket full of apples takes about an hour to scrat and press.  This is enough to produce 25 litres of juice which I leave for a couple of days, skim off the floating residue, and pour into a fermenting vessel.  After adding yeast and a kg of sugar, a lid with airlock is screwed on and the action commences.  Before long you can see the gas bubbling through the airlock and you know that fermentation is happening.

Once the bubbling has ceased, between 7 – 10 days, you can then bottle the fermented juice.  At this stage the liquid smells and tastes a bit rough but I’m assured that the taste will improve in the bottle over the next 3 – 6 months.  I will be calling on “guinea pigs” around September to verify this. Initial reaction from a few friends has been favourable and it’s certainly a huge improvement on the apple scrumpy I purchased at a fair in Oxfordshire a few years ago.

Not everything we’ve done on our property has flirted with disaster.  Our initial decision to plant a Lleylandii cypress hedge around the perimeter of our property was a good one.  We had achieved great results with these trees on our previous property in Bungendore and were keen to repeat the success.

Lleylandii cypress receives lots of bad press but I believe this is not the tree’s fault but the people who plant them.  Nurseries market them as hedging plants when they are actually massive trees when grown to maturity – the trick is to keep them under control early and they are quite compliant to the secateurs.

I’ve limited the height of the hedge to 3 metres and the width to 2 metres.  Although the hedge is still young, this year many of the trees reached their intended height so I simply snipped them off at 3 metres.  This cut will still be visible next year when I trim them back again.

Our decision not to plant a native hedge was an easy one.  There are several varieties of acacia that will do a similar job, and grow more quickly, but they have a limited life span.  The last thing I want to do when I’m seventy is to replace all 240 trees in the hedge.  Callitris are more long-lived but don’t provide the vegetative density I was looking for. There is a long row of dead Lleylandii near the White Spot (Everton) turnoff on the Wangaratta Road, evidence of the severity of the big dry.  However, I have found them to be extremely drought-resistant (more so than some eucalypt species) and there are several examples of long Lleylandii hedges throughout Indigo Shire, but they won’t survive months of no watering.

Many people reading this were brought up with a cast iron stove as the centrepiece of the kitchen.  We bought a new one when we moved into our home and this was a good decision.  It’s so nice to have a large container of soup bubbling away when it’s cold and wet outside while the kettle is always ready for a cuppa.

Maintenance is a breeze and we just wipe the stove with a paper towel and vegetable oil every few weeks to maintain its black colour.   The wood ash is used around our fruit trees and we‘ve never had to buy wood as there is always branches falling across nearby roads or neighbours looking to clear vegetation.   The stove prefers smaller limbs so we can use our fruit tree prunings as well. We also appreciate the stove’s ability to support the solar hot water system on those long overcast weeks when the sun’s power is compromised.  With the cost of electricity continuing to rise, of all our sustainability initiatives the stove gives us the greatest piece of mind.

Next time, I’ll continue to describe the continued successes and failures of our Fighting Gully Road venture.

By Charlie Robinson

I’m tiring of the word “sustainability”.  It must be one of the most over-used words in our lexicon and every politician and company executive must be on a mission to include this word in at least every second sentence or press release.

I watch “lifestyle” shows that describe the construction of so-called sustainable homes where the owners have gone into crippling bank debt, family borrowings and maxed-out credit cards to pay for it.  Sustainable? Hardly. Sustainability should include financial factors as well as other impacts when describing an entity, whether it be a building or a way of life.

When accepting two recent awards on behalf of Beechworth Sustainability, I mentioned that even our title is purely aspirational and bears no resemblance to the lifestyles of its members or those who we seek to motivate and inspire. All of us waste too much water, use too much power, and drive cars as if our oil supplies were as abundant  as our coal reserves.  On the other hand, we do very little to store and conserve our water, few of us grow our own fruit and vegetables, and we are only just beginning to realise the benefits of solar and other alternative energies.

Since my article on food shortages in our region (June 2009), the big dry has claimed the bulk of this year’s wheat and canola crops in western Victoria and NSW (for some farmers, the tenth consecutive failure), and the Victorian dairy industry is on the brink of collapse following poor rainfalls and crippling commodity prices.  A local politician recently speculated that we may soon be importing our whole milk from New Zealand.

Australia’s population rises by around 500,000 people a year, Melbourne has 1700 new residents per week and our politicians talk about sustainable growth when water and food supplies, globally and locally, are declining (in some instances, rapidly).  While Kenya, where 4 million people are on the verge of starvation and their local politicians are in denial (sound familiar?),  may be the canary in the coal mine of the impending global food catastrophe, I see no affirmative action to support Australian farmers and to encourage greater agricultural innovation.  On the contrary, the ACC C seems to favour  the dumping of excess foreign production into Australia, at the expense of local producers, while investment into agricultural research is declining.

Where is the investment in renewable energy?  ABC’s Four Corners program of 14 September revealed the futility of the government’s investment in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology and the very next day the largest solar power array in Australia went into receivership – what an unfortunate juxtaposition of events.  Sustainable energy?  Phooey!!

Despite the bleeding obvious evidence of our demise into potential chaos, I see very little corresponding evidence that people are “joining the dots” and taking the hard decisions necessary for their future survival. I continue to see overseas holidays, new cars, and plasma TVs taking precedence over water tanks, solar power systems, and fruit and vegetable gardens.  The only ray of hope I’ve witnessed lately is the news that chickens have doubled in price on the back of increased demand for backyard chook runs, even in Melbourne.  And Yates announced a few months ago that the sale of their vegetable seeds had risen 35% – pity they’re now owned by Monsanto!

If you’re taking the high moral ground because you’ve converted to low wattage light bulbs or low flow shower heads, you may be smoking hemp rather than wearing it – the changes we are all required to make to survive will need real sacrifice (even foregoing the third car) and commitment.  This means setting financial priorities which may require keeping the old banger for one more year and buying a water tank instead, or (heaven forbid) delaying the holiday in Acapulco and using the savings to purchase a solar hot water system.  It amazes me that people will incur debts of $30,000 or more to buy the latest Commodore but flinch at purchasing a grid-connect PV system because the Government rebate has reduced.

Finances are hardly an issue with growing your own food – next month our group will be conducting its annual seed swapping day. Keep an eye on our calendar for more details.  Our tomato seedlings are doing well and should be ready to plant outside once the danger of frosts has passed.  These seeds were saved from last year’s plantings of heritage tomatoes and we can continue this practise in perpetuity.  You can do the same with peas, beans, capsicums, carrots, brassicas and corn.  Once you can grow your own food, and swap seeds with your friends and neighbours, you are well on the way to real sustainability.

by Gabrielle Prior

Cutting back your kilowatts  – it’s like cutting back calories, but easier! And you don’t have to give up chocolate!!

I started out with the best intentions to get the filing done, but got sidetracked when it came to electricity bills. I wonder how our usage has changed over 3 years………

An hour and a few excel charts and formulae later I discovered our annual average KWh per day has dropped from 25.8 in 2006 to 19.8 in 2008. That’s a decrease of 23%. This is in spite of the fact that I started working from home during this time, which meant more electricity use during the day. 19.8 is still higher than I would like, but given that we use electricity to pump our water, plus the home office, I’m really pleased by this progress.

I should point out that we currently do not have solar hot water (it’s coming when the existing system finally needs replacing), AND our hot water system is too big for just 2 people, so 5-14kw per day (depending on whether we have a bath or not) is accounted for by hot water.

You can see in the chart below we have made the biggest savings in the ‘winter’ quarters: Apr-Jul (29% decrease 06 – 08) and Jul – Oct (39% decrease 06 – 08!!!).

• gradually replaced curtains with blockout-type curtains for better insulation (when they were on sale, of course!) (2007 – 2008)
• making old fashioned draft-stoppers for all the doors (2008)
• replacing power hungry old electric oil heaters with newer electric ones that have timers and temperature sensors so they cut in and out as required, and can go off overnight (eg in the bedroom) (2008)
• I bought a power meter to track how much power individual pieces of equipment use (2008)
• converting to cf bulbs
• replacing the electric kettle with a stovetop kettle (we have a gas stovetop)

But there were still more simple behavour changes we made that have clearly made a huge impact:

• over time I’ve gradually turned down the temperature on the hot water unit to minimise reheating time
• we ‘curtained off’ the end of the house that we don’t use unless guests are here, so we’re only heating the part of the house we use
• in 2008 we ‘decomissioned’ the second bathroom unless guests were staying – so that meant turning off the second small hot water unit for that bathroom, and not having to heat the bathroom in winter. I think this was strangely the ‘hardest’ adjustment as we quite liked having our own bathroom each!!
• in 2008 I relocated my home office to the end of the house that we use in winter. This was also something I resisted as I quite liked being able to have the office a bit more seperate to the rest of the house. However, as my office was in the “curtained off”, and therefore unheated part of the house, I was using a lot of power to drag the temperature up from 12 to 16 every day, and running a heater 5-7 hours per day. It was a bit mad looking back on it. In the new study I might only have to run the heater for an hour or so on really cold days. And I can always just pop around the corner and warm up by the fire.
• in 2008 I also ‘bubble-glazed‘ the study/office windows to keep the room warmer, but still let in light.
• I switched to only using ‘eco’ mode on the dishwasher (which saves about 50% of the power compared to the normal cycle that includes drying)
• I use my slow cooker as much as possible in winter rather than the oven to cook meals – and I try to make enough for 4-6 serves per meal to make the most of the power use
• We have progressively removed light fittings from our halogen track lighting eg over the dining table we had 6 (or maybe 7) and now we only have 4. In the main living area we had 5 and now we have 3. In addition we try to use lamps with cf bulbs rather than the track lighting whenever possible.
• We have used insulting foam or mud to seal gaps that were letting in drafts

But of course, there is still more we can do! On the power saving to do list are:

• solar hot water
• finish replacing old curtains with insulating curtains in the rest of the house
• moving from rod and ring style curtain fittings to track fittings so we can get the curtains closer to the window (pelmets just wouldn’t work in our style of house)
• replacing the old standard fridge with a chest fridge
• keep up with the gap-sealing work
• opening up the chimney to expose more flue and replacing the fireplace with one that I can put a pot/kettle on to slow cook food during the day / keep water hot for a cuppa .

Alas most of these need some serious $$, so I’d best get back to work!