I just did a bill on bill comparison between our June energy consumption for last year versus this year. It turns out that we have successfully reduced our actual energy consumption for our motel manager flat by 487 kWh in just one month this winter.
This is actually amazing. That is equivalent to over 16 kWh of energy reductions per day. So often in my environmental antics I am used to coming up with some hare-brained scheme to reduce our energy consumption or emissions, only to be met by failure of equivocal results in the data outcomes. To have succeeded once and so significantly is to me a real boost.
A portion of this will have come from solar panels, although solar generates notoriously less power during winter, with many days generating less than 1 kWh. I toted up the average amount that solar contributed to the month, and this came to just 2.19 kWh per day, leaving 13.82 kWh per day attributable to heat consumption reduction.
487 kWh is likely to equate to a very significant reduction in carbon emissions. While it’s difficult to say exactly what reduction in emissions this would yield in New Zealand, because so much of our energy supply already comes from renewable energy sources, it is very likely that, during winter especially, the extra marginal energy generation during peak hours would have correlated to coal or even diesel emissions. (I deliberately planned out our power use so that around 35% of it now occurs during ‘off peak’ hours, between 11pm and 7am, which tends to correlate to very low levels of demand on the grid – meaning that even the energy we did consume is likely to have been greener.)
If we accept that 1 kWh of coal consumption equates to 0.94 kg of carbon emissions, then our little motel manager flat has saved 458 kg of emissions in this month. This is perhaps a little unrealistic, because of the renewable energy thing – so let’s assume instead a 75% correlation with coal emissions – resulting in 343 kg in CO2 emissions. This is without even attempting to calculate the CO2 savings that may have resulted from switching energy consumption to off-peak hours.
487 kWh is also a significant financial saving as well. All up it comes to $118.34 plus GST in savings. That’s (unbelievably) around $3.89 in energy savings per day. And keep in mind that we have just about been through the coldest month of the year, with miserable wet days where we broke all our rules and took our timers out of the wall and ran the heater all day to keep warm.
So being an eco-grinch pays off. It’s all thanks to timers, heating restrictions, and mandatory thermal underpants for my family.
