Petro-poverty and Electric Opportunity

Here’s an interesting statistic for you. According to Dr Saul Griffith at Rewiring Australia, Australia’s 10 million households are responsible for around 42% of our domestic carbon emissions, 33.5% of which is attributed to home energy and personal vehicle usage.

Australian households use just over 100kWh of energy (including the energy required to power personal vehicles). If all households switched to electric solutions, then they’d use around 37kWh, which is an amount of energy that could be nearly completely satisfied with a 10-12 kW capacity solar installation and a compatible home battery.

What do these carbon and kilowatt numbers mean in dollars though?

Dr Saul and his team have calculated that a solar and battery powered home and electric car combo would cost about $559 per year to run, while a majority gas and petrol home and car combo currently costs a whopping $5517. That’s not a typo – the majority of Australian households are paying a whopping $5000 per year more than they could be.

For a country in the grips of a cost of living crisis AND a climate crisis (we’ve just had our fifth mass coral bleaching event in the past eight years) it looks like tradies need to come to the rescue, and fast.

Dean Ipaviz and his team from Verdecon are leaders in the field of ‘Responsible Construction’. They strive to build beautiful homes whilst minimising the impact on nature.

Big Ideas and Bad Manners

I’m not sure how the idea to engage tradies on climate really came to me, but when I got the job at Surfers for Climate and was tasked with engaging the Australian surfers who weren’t really dialled in on climate, I remembered that all my mates who were tradies were back home. While well aware that ...