Regrow Qld 14 July Issue 27 Vol 2 (Subscriber)
Dispatches from Brisbane, a new petition, electric diggers, community microgrids, make your own hand soap and Greg investigates car sharing.
gladstoneconservationcouncil.com.au - 0412 502 798 - gladconscouncil@gmail.com
It’s winter, such as it is in Queensland. Southerners skip about in shorts and a T-shirt while we drag out doonas, fluffy slippers and hot water bottles. A perfect time for some gentle reading and reflection, so we have created a magazine with a positive vision for our future, every week.
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Editorial
Anna Hitchcock
It’s a lovely sight to see actual clouds over farmland, and they even got some actual rain as well to go with them. Too often of late the clouds have passed over without even spitting on Central Queensland. The news has been so appalling lately I feel like throwing in the towel, buying a cottage out bush and spending the rest of my days growing the perfect parsley plant.
Still, there is some reason for hope. Given that ‘Sydeney’ is now infected with plague, you can bet that the vaccinations will be sped up to light speed. Cue various politicians taking the credit for work that other people have done.
Green hydrogen is now firmly on the agenda for Gladstone, and regenerative agriculture is moving along quite nicely as well.
It’s beautiful weather for walking and gardening, you’re unlikely to dissolve into a puddle of sweat and you may even enjoy a few minutes of sunshine without turning into ash like a vampire (or is that just me in summer?).
So head outside and enjoy the world. It’s a wonderful place… (phone pings)
Ok Ok well that’s not quite so wonderful, thanks so much for the photo Greg!
Anyone got a cottage for sale?
Anna
Letters
We try to keep you all up to date with what is happening regarding the proposed coal mine just north of Bundaberg. Here’s the latest correspondence from Minister Stewart.
A clear concern in the community is that the ‘exploratory drilling’ will damage the aquifers which are so heavily relied upon in this community - for agriculture and also for domestic use.
Petition
There’s a new petition to sign here - focussed on the current decision about a Mineral Development Licence: please sign and share to help us influence the decision in our favour.
https://www.change.org/No_Coal_Mine_in_Bundaberg
NEWS
From Future Crunch:
“…a new piece of reporting from the Financial Times. According to the latest estimates, the vast majority of new coal-power plants being planned around the world will not make back their upfront costs. Specificially, 92% of facilities proposed or under construction globally would cost more to build than the future cash flow they would generate. Pipelines? More like pipe dreams.”
“Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, quiet, clean, and green are not words you would typically use to describe a construction site, but on one of the busiest streets in the heart of Oslo, there's something special going on: in a world-first, all the machinery used on site, excavators, diggers, and loaders, are now electric.”
Forward thinking -
Peter van Beek (1)
A brighter future for Regional Australia - thanks to Renewable Energy (Part 4)(2)
THE FUTURE OF SMALL TOWNS - YACKANDANDAH (3)
The small town of Yackandandah near Albury Wodonga in Victoria is close to reaching the point where they can rely 100% on Renewable energy. The project has been driven by a volunteer community group “Totally Renewable Yackandandah” (4) since 2014.
Their aim is to make the town of about 1,800 people entirely powered by solar and storage by 2022. An important step was the recent installation of a battery. It is one part of their program which includes promoting roof solar - 60% of buildings of buildings in the Yack valley so far. Another goal is to replace old hot water systems with renewable ones.
Battery being delivered – Source: Off -the Grid
The battery (5) (274kWh for the experts) will work alongside a 64-kW roof top solar array. Together they will provide power to up to 40 households, including the evening peak.
64-kW rooftop solar – Source: ‘Totally Renewable Yackandandah’’.
The solar and battery system is community-owned and operates as a Micro grid. A Micro-grid is part of the main power grid but can operate on its own when needed or wanted. It consists of suppliers, in this case people who own roof top solar systems and want to sell their surplus electricity, buyers who want to buy renewable electricity, a battery as back-up, a smart metering and administrative system and a single connection to the main grid.
Each participant has a sub-meter and power is bought and sold first within the system. Too much or too little electricity can be sold to or bought from the main grid. Their design is very flexible so the Micro-grid can meet local needs and preferences, and cope with local conditions. In a community-owned Micro-grid the decisions about price and conditions are made locally.
Image by The Weekly Times https://tinyurl.com/qe22hd9b
We know that electricity supply can be disrupted for weeks at a time by natural disasters such as fire and flood. A microgrid’s big advantage is reliability of supply, lower electricity prices and keeping money in the community instead of sending it away. Social benefits are that they help build strong local communities with diverse economies. This is something we are learning to value in these days of uncertainty about borders and lock-downs.
The Queensland Farmers Federation has a project to develop and promote micro-grids in Queensland rural areas. (6) It appears not to include small communities yet, but that may come if people ask for it.
This article may be copied and re-distributed under Australian Creative Comments Licence with attribution of author and source: Peter Van Beek - Regrow QLD – Gladstone Conservation Council.
Part 1 of this series is about ‘No more power bills’ and ‘Converting diesel vehicles to electric’. Part 2 is about ’Reliability of supply’ and part 3 about ‘Community solar’.
https://onestepoffthegrid.com.au/community-owned-battery-launches-in-yackandandah-victorias-first/
https://totallyrenewableyack.org.au/watts-happening/yack01-community-battery/
Eco Friendly Living:
In these days of plague, we need to make sure that hands are super clean, and so I have diverted from simple soap and water to a hand wash.
Buying multiple pump bottles of hand wash is not great for the environment of course, but you can refill your hand wash with a simple recipe.
I use this in the kitchen so that I can give my hands a good clean when I come in from being out in the world. Clean hands are a great idea anyway, reducing any number of diseases and infections. I understand that the incidence of serious influenza has reduced to almost nothing as we are more conscious about hand sanitising.
The recipe:
One good squirt of a dishwashing liquid your hands can cope with
One good glug of hand sanitiser
The bottle should be about 1/6 full
Top up with water
This produces a thin foam that’s effective and saves you a fortune in hand soap which is mostly water anyway.
We avoid perfumes in this house but you could add a few drops of a nice smelling oil as well.
Hopefully the plague will subside soon, but let’s keep the good hand washing up!
Opinion:
Greg Bray
Take My Car… Please!
Folks, recently I gazed down from my lockdown unit at some of the 600 e-scooters littering Brisbane’s inner-city district and wondered how long it will be when we see fleets of dinky, e-share, cars being dumped onto our city streets?
Well, wonder no more, good citizens! Because several people who are obviously much quicker on the uptake than I’ll ever be (which, frankly, is not that high a bar to step over) are already onto something more innovative.
Check out this page (WAIT! After you finish reading): Car Sharing Across Australia | Car Next Door
Now, the cost of a taxi (or an Uber) to travel 15klm in inner city Brisbane will take 20 minutes and dent your bank balance by $50; or considerably more if the driver thinks you’re a backwoods hick (good to see free market, roving opportunism is still being practiced in the Big Smoke).
The same distance in a small share car will set you back roughly $25 and there’s over 150 car sharing vehicles in Brisbane alone, including utes and vans.
One of them, a little Honda hatch costs $6 an hour, or $36 for the day, plus $0.33 cents per km.
So, even if you got lost and spent most of your day chewing up 150km trying to negotiate your way around Brisbane’s clogged suburban road network, it’s still going to leave you with enough change from a hundred bucks to buy a couple of beers and some hot chips to calm your nerves afterwards.
Importantly, many commentors stated the car was clean and smelled good.
This is a great selling point to people like me who always seem to wind up using public toilets after a footy team have been in them following curry night at the club.
… and this is one of the good ones.
Right now, most of us prefer to drive our own cars, but it is a significant expense on our living costs, and a big problem for our road networks. Especially when you think about how much time our cars spend sitting idle, at home or in car parks.
So, why not put your mooching, dollar soaking, auto to work when you don’t need it?
If car sharing took off potentially, since the Model T first rattled ashore, we’d see a reduction in the number of cars on our roads as more people turn to sharing/renting cars.
Why not, we do it with housing?
Less cars would also make it much safer for non-motorists to use our roads, possibly encouraging an uptake in biking, e-biking, scootering and walking. Which would have the added benefit of improving our nations’ fitness levels while reducing smog (prove me wrong!)
Anyway, I checked, and right now in my hometown, nobody has signed up to share their car, but the fact this scheme has been running successfully in our larger cities for a few years means it’s only a matter of time.
Just out of interest, how many of you would like the chance to drive a rare, classic, 21-year-old Camry?
This unique vehicle (one of only 2.1 million built in Oz) could be yours! (For a couple of hours).