You may have noticed that I’ve just added a new page to the menu bar above these posts, Australian Rebates.

I’ve tried to collect all the information I could find on Australian federal rebate programs, as well as all the different rebate schemes for the various states. There are a lot of good opportunities in there [...]

The Australian government is waffling on the issue of a nationalised renewable energy feed-in tariff for homes. Recent announcements seem to indicate that they’ll favour a net tariff, which is very much inferior to the gross feed-in tariff the solar industry is calling for.

A gross feed-in tariff (where the energy-producing household is paid for all [...]

Have you considered switching to green power?

Are you overwhelmed by the choices?

There are dozens of green energy suppliers, offering all sorts of plans and options. Some suppliers are ‘greener’ than others, and prices vary widely, so how do you choose who to go with?

Enter the EasySwitch web site.

You simply enter your postcode, and they show [...]

We received an email last night from Earth Utility confirming our order for a 1 kW solar power system. They also phoned today to make sure we were kept informed. I’m really happy with their service so far.

WARNING: Earth Utility appears to be in trouble (updated 28-04-2010).

Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the [...]

IBM and Harvard University have launched a new distributed computing initiative called The Clean Energy Project. They want to harness the spare computing power of thousands of computers around the world to crunch numbers and search for potential materials to be used in new-generation polymer solar cells.

Polymer solar cells will be cheaper to manufacture than [...]

If you’re in Australia and have been thinking about getting a grid-connected solar power system, there’s a really good deal right now with Earth Utility. If you order before 15 December 2008, it’ll cost $2,500 installed (after rebates, RECs, etc and excluding utility connection costs).

WARNING: Earth Utility appears to be in trouble (updated 28-04-2010)

I just [...]

I just read an interesting article in ReNew Magazine Issue 104 about the guerrilla solar movement and one individual’s experiments with his unapproved DIY grid-connect solar panels.

It’s not as dangerous as it sounds. Solar guerrillas use commercial mains power inverters which meet the relevant international standards to feed their electricity into the grid. You plug [...]

When shopping for whitegoods and appliances, the energy star ratings can be a useful guide to judge the relative energy efficiency of different makes and models.

Be careful, though, because the stars can be misleading if you’re not comparing like-for-like.

For example, this week we were looking at chest freezers (we want to be able to buy [...]

What is it?

The MS6115 mains power meter is a device for measuring the electrical power used by an appliance. It looks like an electronic timer switch (see photo at right). You plug it into your power point, and then plug your appliance into it to measure its power use.

What does it do?

You can use the [...]

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in [...]