Our Electricity Consumption creates Zero Emissions
- Clyde Anderson
- Jul, 19, 2016
- Case Study, Efficient Design Elements
- Comments Off on Our Electricity Consumption creates Zero Emissions
Can you have completely renewable electricity that produces no greenhouse gas emissions?
Energy Efficiency isn’t just in our name, it’s what we strive for. We’d like to show you that going “green” is not only an achievable goal, but in many cases it can also have a positive impact on your wallet!
A few years ago we installed a Photovoltaic (PV) Solar Panel system on our roof. It consists of 20 panels mounted on angled frames, with a peak capacity of 5kW. Solar panels also have the added benefit of shading your roof. And to show some hard numbers for the kind of benefits this system can provide, we’re releasing a copy of one of our own recent 12 month Electricity Consumption Reports, which includes Peak electricity, Hot Water (Tariff 31) and Renewable Energy generation (Solar PV).
The surplus electricity generated by the PV system means that our Mains meter reading was lower than average. In fact, over the last year we have actually generated more surplus electricity than we purchased! Because Tariff 31 is overnight (from 11pm to 7am), there was (of course) no solar contribution made during that time.
Here’s the technical breakdown:
Average export Net Solar = 10.9kWh/day
Compared to:
Average import Peak+Tariff 31 = 6.2kWh/day
Year-long average gross export = 4.7kWh/day
The average export during Winter was only 2.4kWh/day, but the average export in Summer was 6.7kWh/day.
Producing our own solar power wasn’t enough! We also made the business decision to purchase all our grid-supplied electricity as 100% Green Power (mostly wind-sourced). Talk to your supplier about making the switch to “Green” power. Therefore what grid power we do purchase is all 100% sustainable. Additionally, because we generate more renewable energy than we use, we export it back into the grid making us “Doubly Green” – we actually have negative Greenhouse Gas emissions!