The City of Sydney has embarked on an exciting roll-out of new energy-efficient LED street and park lights. The installation of LED lights across the city centre sees it join other major cities such as Los Angeles, Barcelona and Berlin in the endeavour for a greener, more sustainable future.

Installation has begun on the first set of LED lights on George Street, in front of Sydney Town Hall. Following a successful 18 month trial in Alexandria Park, Kings Cross, Martin Place and Circular Quay, the LED roll-out is a $7 million, three year project.

In the public survey conducted after the trial, 90 per cent of people said the new lighting appealed, with three-quarters saying it improved visibility.

LED lights are made up of a semi-conductor material and consequently reduce emissions and halve energy use. “Replacing 6,450 conventional lights will save nearly $800,000 a year in electricity bills and maintenance costs,” said City of Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore.

The LED lights require far less electricity and last much longer, reducing the 30 per cent contribution public lighting previously made to Sydney’s greenhouse gas emissions.  This is equivalent to 2861 tonnes or taking 940 cars off the road.

Sustainable Sydney plans

Sydney has positioned itself as Australia’s first carbon neutral city, and set out in the Sustainable Sydney 2030 Plan an ambitious target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 per cent, based on 2006 levels.

To achieve this target, the UK energy expert Allan Jones has been appointed to lead the project. His previous work reduced greenhouse gas emissions in the city of Woking, Surrey by 80 per cent.

Sydney will be transformed into a low carbon city powered by trigeneration systems and renewable energy. As well as electricity supply, trigeneration can also heat and cool buildings, and is three times more efficient than current systems.

Adding to the beauty of the plan is the capacity to add a decentralised water system and an automated waste collection process.

The plan stretches beyond council sites to household strategies and also includes supplying affordable housing to the residents of Sydney, in an environmentally sustainable way.

Sydney’s switch to LED lighting is a significant decision as Australia moves to a low carbon future. “Sydney’s leadership provides a clear signal to other Australian councils: LED technology is ready,” said Caroline Bayliss from the Climate Group.

The Greening of Gavin http://www.greeningofgavin.com/

This is a well structured and visual blog from an individual who has an absolute passion for sharing his sustainability journey and inspiring others. Gavin does this by including videos, podcast interviews on climate change, solar power, his home-built cob oven and his making of cheese and soap

Turkey’s Nest http://turkeysnestmtglorious.blogspot.com/

This blog is an offshoot of Rose and Russell’s small cottage accommodation business with a sustainable philosophy, in the mountains just outside Brisbane. Supplementing the description of their eco-building project, which uses light earth and recycled materials, is promotion of a healthier more sustainable lifestyle through illustrating the joys of handmade and discussing the economics of recycling materials.

Small Steps for Sustainability http://smallstepsforsustainability.blogspot.com/

This blog is a description of the variety of changes that Clare’s household undertook in order to live more sustainability. The simple, practical and affordable ideas are a means for inspiration and easy to implement. Posts vary from water saving to recycling bottle tops for exciting children’s games.

Sustainaburbia http://sustainaburb.blogspot.com.au/

A hugely informative blog which demonstrates the ability to make the world more sustainable on a limited budget with limited DIY skills, mainly through behavioural change. It encourages us to embrace our inner creative; with posts ranging from the technicalities of PVs to making own apple juice, it gives practical instructions to help in a variety of ways.

A  Green Tasmanian Renovation www.greentasreno.wordpress.com

As a comprehensive guide to work on a weatherboard house in Tasmania, this blog is enriched by a library of pictures and broken down room by room renovation posts.  It is defined by its vastly informative posts on sustainable or recycled products, solar power and alternative hot water systems to name a few.

Cruickshank Renovation www.49cruikreno.blogspot.com

The product of a Sustainability consultant, this blog specifically focuses on the reality of green initiatives that were discovered as a sustainable renovation was attempted and completed.   It discusses fencing, the difficulty in sourcing eco concrete and the uses of a thermal camera to improve insulation.

Solar Quotes http://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/

Containing a wealth of information and video guides, this blog is an analytical source that offers advice on purchasing solar electricity systems and solar power itself. As well as keeping people up to date on solar news and politics, it offers a free no obligation quote service.

Solar Business Services www.solarbusiness.com.au

Providing independent Australian PV industry news, information and commentary this blog distinctly focuses on being objective and unbiased. It features reports, a frequently asked question section and some ‘just for fun’ videos that are wholly entertaining.

Bogie Bush Build http://bogiebushbuild.blogspot.com/

Recording the trials and tribulations of John O’Brien’s building of a strawbale house in the Strathbogie Tabelands, the blog is an honest sharing of progress and hard work onsite.  As well as breaking down the stages, detailed plans demonstrate the great vision and individuality behind the project.

Convenient Solutions http://convenientsolutions.blogspot.com

Utilizing charts, diagrams and video clips, this blog promotes ways to produce or save energy but also displays small pieces of climate science in a user-friendly way. Posts are filled with positive news on renewable energy or transport, information on government initiatives and examples of how to reduce carbon emission.

Solar@CSIRO http://csirosolarblog.com

The blog is a way to directly share information on solar energy technologies between scientists and readers.  Aside from its information on large scale topics and detailed project descriptions, it makes solar science fun, interesting and easy to understand for beginners and experts alike.

Little Adelaide Kate www.littleadelaidekate.com

Little Adelaide Kate is centered on creative and ethical living. A humorous and crafty blog that shares Kate’s own experiences and promotes a variety of sustainable living options. It featuring posts on vegetarian cooking, social justice as well as her impending wedding and ability to source an ethical engagement ring.

Green Renters http://www.greenrenters.org/

This blog is the passionate product of a non profit organisation providing sustainability advice specifically for those living in rental accommodation. By creating an online community, the posts are full of tips, enthusiastic tutorials, product reviews and inspiring stories for renters.

Urban Environment News http://bruceboyes.info/urban-environment-news/

Urban Environment News assists people in urban and peri-urban areas to readily access the latest environment, sustainability and natural resource management news in one location. With a resource library and a ‘Discover China Section’ it is wholly informative in an interesting way.

Read more about ReNew blog of the year winner Gavin Webber here.

By day, Gavin Webber is a mild-mannered IT professional working in Melbourne’s CBD.

But at night and on weekends he becomes a committed and feverish blogger, informing the world and giving practical tips on cheese making, apple growing, chooks, DIY backyard building and many other
sustainability topics.

The father of four, from Melton in Victoria, has been named Australia’s best green blogger after a national competition by ReNew magazine.

He started The Greening of Gavin in 2008 as part of a dramatic change in lifestyle after seeing the documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

“I was a conspicuous consumer before I saw the movie,” he says. “It was a wake-up call. Why did I not know more about climate change? I decided to do my own research to understand the politics and human side of it all.”

Within months Gavin had bought a hybrid car, converted his hot water system to solar, installed solar panels on the roof of his house and ripped up the lawns to plant vegetables and fruit trees.

He has written more than 1000 blog posts since starting The Greening of Gavin, on subjects as diverse as peak oil, home-made spaghetti, Christmas gift ideas for the anti-consumer, worm
farms and bread making.

“I’m just an ordinary bloke. I try to show what can be done at home, and if I can do it anybody can if they have the space or inclination.”

Jacinta Cleary, the editor of ReNew, congratulated Gavin on his outstanding blog:

“This blog has a lot of heart. It’s not just about the practical changes that Gavin has made at home, it is also about why he has made the sustainability shift in what he describes as a journey of highs and lows.”

Read the full wrap up on ReNew’s Blog of the Year comp here

Grid-interactive solar power systems have become pretty popular in the last decade or so, but they usually have one large drawback. If the mains grid fails, for whatever reason, then your solar power system not only stops feeding energy into the grid but it also stops feeding the house.

The main reason for this is that it is a safety feature called anti-islanding—meaning that your home won’t act as an independent ‘island’, generating energy and trying to feed it into the grid when it shouldn’t.
But what if you want some backup for when the mains grid goes down? There’s good reasons for this, including protecting expensive refrigerated food stocks, running water pressure pumps and providing lighting during night-time failures.

Most grid-interactive systems are not designed to include battery backup and will need an inverter upgrade and possible solar array rewire to include such backup, as well as the addition of a suitably sized backup battery bank of course. However, even if you have a grid-interactive system that you are currently happy with, there’s still a way to add some battery backup, which we will look at briefly later.

Integrated systems
So what options for battery-backed grid-interactive inverters are there? There’s two broad categories: integrated inverter-chargers and what I loosely term add-on systems, which involve adding purpose-designed backup components to existing grid-interactive systems.

As a semi-retired engineer I have always dabbled in technical projects and probably always will. This latest project came about when my electricity retailer Synergy cut the rate paid per kilowatt-hour of electricity sent to the grid to 7c per kWh, to coincide with the introduction of the West Australian government’s feed-in tariff in 2010.

The thought that, after my solar feed-in tariff ended in ten years, my system would become merely a cheap generator supplying all the local air conditioners at a profit to my power company annoyed me. Especially as I would have to fund any maintenance to the solar PV system from my pension.

So I decided not to invest further in additional grid-connect panels but rather, to put my dollars into making my home office totally independent of the grid. I built an off-grid solar power system with 12 volt battery storage, supplying a 240 volt inverter at the lowest cost possible.

Online shopping for parts
I sourced a pair of new 6 volt deep cycle lead-acid batteries from a local retailer. The brand was Interstate Batteries model GC2-HD-UTL, with a capacity of 216 amp-hours each. I purchased a 200 watt, 12 volt monocrystalline solar panel for $500 from eBay store LHP Power, which came with a 25-year warranty, and found a low cost 10 amp solar controller from a Chinese eBay supplier.

The solar controller has three sets of connectors, one for the PV panel, one for the load, and the third for the battery bank. The solar controller prevents overcharging the batteries, unwanted discharge of the batteries through the PV system at night, and disconnects the load to prevent battery damage if it becomes run down.

After purchasing a couple of low cost 800 watt 12-240 volt inverters from another Chinese eBay store I was ready to roll with my first system.

A while back I was lucky enough to enjoy a trip to Europe, where I was struck by the widespread use of bikes for everyday use. In Amsterdam I was particularly impressed by the ubiquitous cargo bike, to be seen at every turn ferrying children to and from primary school, bringing home the groceries or delivering goods for small businesses.

Often the next step after looking at a bike is trying it out, but unfortunately the opportunity never presented itself and I returned home wondering what it would be like to use one of these amazing machines for real.

I started looking at them on the internet and discovered that I could purchase an imported Bakfiets cargo bike quite easily, but the prices were enough to make my eyes water.

Birth of a shed project
Somehow the idea of owning a cargo bike just wouldn’t go away and six months later I hit on an answer—I’d build my own! Perhaps I have too much spare time, but all of those shed projects have to start somewhere.

What about raw materials? During an early morning walk around the local streets I noticed that the piles of junk waiting for the next council kerbside collection included several bikes, in various states of repair. Some were complete wrecks, while others were in reasonable condition and even too good for what I had in mind. I returned home with a couple of likely candidates: a venerable Malvern Star ‘racer’ and a ‘supermarket’ mountain bike, complete with sprung fork.

A conventional cargo bike has a smaller front wheel, typically about 20 inches (51 centimetres). This is for practical purposes, allowing the front fork to fit in front of the cargo box and making it easier to arrange a steering linkage. However, among my collection of ‘it’ll be useful some day’ bits and pieces, I had a front wheel complete with a 200 watt motor, which seemed like a worthwhile addition to the project. I couldn’t see any way of building the motor into a smaller wheel, so I decided that my cargo bike would have a full size front wheel.

With smart meters installed in nearly half of Victorian households and the rest set to have them by the end of 2013, many have been wondering how they can benefit from the new technology. Smart meters capture far more detailed household energy use data than the old spinning-disk style accumulation meters they replace, but until now, households haven’t been able to tap into this information to better understand their electricity use.

Jemena, one of Victoria’s five distribution businesses, has jumped ahead of the pack and developed a new web portal that displays a customer’s electricity data online, enabling the household or small business to monitor their electricity consumption, along with a host of other features including a home energy assessment tool. Called Electricity Outlook, the portal is currently being trialled and is set to go live later this year.

Jemena has offered ATA members access to the trial, with many taking up the offer late last year. Participants need to live within Jemena’s distribution network area and currently have a smart meter installed under the Victorian Government rollout program. This is distinct from a bidirectional interval meter, installed to monitor output from a PV system, sometimes incorrectly referred to as a smart meter.

Monitoring benefits
Electricity usage data can be viewed in day, week, month, season or year formats, with both energy use and cost shown for each. Comparisons can be made against your suburb’s average for that time period and you can set yourself a target for energy reduction, for instance a 10% target, and see how you are tracking against that target.

The tariff comparison page allows you to input three different tariff offers, including the fixed charges, tariff rates and the time-of-use tariff structure. The web portal then takes your current electricity use data over the time period specified and provides an overall cost comparison between the different tariff types. It will then tell how much better (or worse) off you would be changing your retail product from your current one: e.g. on one tariff you might have saved $15 over the last month and another might have cost $5 more.

Electricity Outlook features

• See electricity consumption—as well as export for solar customers—up to midnight of the previous day
• View data over different time ranges and in half-hourly, hourly, daily or monthly intervals
• Track changes to see how energy use changes daily or seasonally
• Set and follow a percentage target for reducing energy use
  Compare different tariff offers to determine which retail product would be the cheapest

• Register to connect an In-Home Display (IHD) to view your electricity consumption data in real time, and eventually register other Zigbee Home Area Network devices. For more information refer to Smart meters: a rough guide in ReNew 111. Before buying an IHD, ATA recommends seeing what’s offered in coming months under their inclusion in the Victorian Energy Efficiency Target (VEET)
• Register for power outage and outage restoration notifications via SMS and email.

Smart meter products to expand
While Victoria is the only state with a government mandated smart meter rollout, smart meters are appearing in other states and territories. With the advent of the technology, a range of other products and services associated with smart meters, such as web portals, in-home displays and smart phone apps are beginning to emerge.

Another distributor, United Energy, is trialling a similar web portal for customers in their distribution network and at least two other Victorian distributors are following. With in-home displays soon to be subsidised in Victoria under the Victorian Energy Efficiency Target (VEET), the market for smart meter products and services should evolve considerably in 2012.

Knowing that Citroëns are lightweight vehicles suitable for electric car conversions, I have taken a Citroën 2CV, previously crashed between two four-wheel drives and converted it to electric. I am an electric vehicle and Citroën enthusiast and already own a vintage Citroën AK van, plus a more modern Citroën hatchback.

With a badly damaged boot from the crash, I decided to make it a utility, with 160kg of batteries bolted to the back tray. The original gearbox and disc brake have been retained, close coupled to the electric motor, while the engine, exhaust, fuel tank and air cleaner have all been removed.

The front and rear bumpers were destroyed in the crash and have been replaced with aluminium bumpers. Standard 2cv tail lights have been recessed into the ute back and a Citroën logo has been glued in place.

The station is a working example of renewable energy and green power, and is an important step in the expansion of open access public EV charging facilities.

The station is powered by 2.7kW PV panels that have been fitted on the station’s roof. The station is fitted with a ChargePoint, which is compatible with all major electric vehicles on the market or about to come on the market. EV drivers will be able to locate and navigate themselves to the station with an iPhone or Android app.

The project has been realised through a Green Precincts Grant from the Federal Department of Sustainability and is a collaboration with the Victorian Department of Transport, Delta Energy Systems and Q-Cells Australia.

The solar PV system that will generate clean and renewable electricity to power electric vehicles was donated by Delta who provided the inverter and Q-Cells who provided the solar modules.

The station is part of the Victoria Government’s Electric Vehicle Trial, created to better understand the process, timelines and barriers for making to transition to electric vehicle technology. The trial is being delivered by the Department of Transport until mid 2014 and 180 households and 60 company fleets will be involved.

Go to www.ceres.org.au

Subscribers will start to receive their copy of ReNew 119 this week, featuring an array of off-grid content. The theme is “Off-grid in city and bush’, referring to independent solar power systems in urban and rural environments.

A solar shed

Di Bott and her family lived in a solar-powered shed for seven years while building their rammed earth home. The stand-alone power system helped power their tools for building.

Power when the grid goes down

Technical editor Lance Turner shows how a solar grid-interactive house can still have power when the mains grid fails.

Trials and tribulations of DIY solar

Martin Chape made an independent power supply for his lights and home office. Next it will be the whole home as he tries to escape his electricity retailer.

New look

Readers will also notice a few changes here and there. We’ve gone for a new design this issue, helping to make a dense magazine more enjoyable for our readership. Underneath the new fonts and heading styles its still the same magazine with all the regular sections and topics.

Let us know what you think about the new look. Is it easier to read, or not quite there yet? Are sections such as the buyers guide in a more readable format?

Leave your comments below, or email renew@ata.org.au. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.