We’ve been a bit slack with our blogs but having just got another Sustainable House Day out of the way (virtual again this year) http://sustainablehouseday.com we can catch up a bit.

Sue and I have actually been quite busy with community and political activity. She with the local environment centre and a community garden project and me with my nomination to the Greens.

What brings about this blog is an amazing notification we recently received. Our green electricity provider sent an email (and then a confirming account) that out charges would be reduced! In fact they fell about 7c per kWh. That’s 36.59 to 29.27. It’s not often that prices go down – I don’t think that I can ever remember it happening for power!

After picking myself up from the floor I thought that I would look into this – especially as the merchants of doom had been predicting the exact opposite for years. You know, “Renewables are so expensive and burning coal and gas is so cheap, we’ll never be able to afford them”.

So we come to the screen shot above. Since being referred to it by a friend I have found OpenNEM a fascinating source of inspiration. I keep it as a tab in my browser (https://opennem.org.au ) so that I can open it easily for a quick squiz – especially of our figures here in SA!

It turns out that the SA grid has been gradually getting more supply from renewables – especially from roof top solar (pale yellow in the graph). Showing that even if (or maybe because) some governments won’t do anything about Climate Change, ordinary people are. The SA grid has been running on 100% renewables for several hours a day more and more often. And as above – for most of 15 hrs!

I was awed by a few days around 3-4 Oct when we were running on almost 100% renewables for nearly a full day. It has been predicted by others that SA will soon be the first major grid in the world to run on 100% solar (https://reneweconomy.com.au )

As more renewables and more storage and ‘frequency firming’ technologies come on line our gas burning generators will become unnecessary and will eventually be shut down for ever. I reckon it is a good sign that our grids will go to zero carbon much sooner than predicted by the nay-sayers.  Yes! Good news for those of us that want to see global temperature rise less than 1.5 deg C.

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