Carbon Tax Repeal

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With that slight amount of advertising out of the way, I thought I would talk about the repeal of the Australian Carbon Tax, and ways that technology can help us now that the repeal is in place. The thing about the Carbon Tax is that the impact on electricity prices was fairly minor, at about 10%. This is dwarfed into insignificance when you look at the increases in the investment into Poles and Wires, with the resulting price rises. I am not saying that this investment was not needed, but that the Carbon Tax was minor when compared to other price signals. Whilst not an environmental measure, these signals ended up having that effect.

Speaking personally, I know that with the increases in electricity I looked at areas where I was using energy, and where I could change thing. One of these was my computing Infrastructure. A few years ago I was using a pair of Dell commercial grade servers running VMware. They were more energy efficient than running individual machines, but ended up costing probably $1000/year for electricity. Purchase price of this hardware was not much higher than this. I replaced these machines with a single desktop class machine that I purchased for under $1000. This machine cost about a years cost in electricity, but the running costs were about 1/4 of the old machines. Payback for replacing the hardware was just over a year. For the three or so years I was running that machine, the investment was worth it. I have since decommissioned that machine and am doing things differently.

I also had two NAS storage arrays, and a windows machine running some special software on it. I recently replaced all three with a single NAS with the special software now running under Linux. Whilst there was not much improvement in energy use, I did get improved functionality for the same electrical load. I call that a win, when measured on an Outcome/kWh basis.

Heating and Cooling is interesting. My ceiling was filled with a collection of R1.5 or R2.0 insulation. Rather dispose of this insulation, I doubled it up, creating insulation rated between R3.0 and R4.0. I then filled in the holes with R3.5 insulation. In effect, I recycled the insulation. I also installed R1.5 underfloor insulation where I could. This significantly reduced my energy costs, mostly during winter.

And finally, I have the Redshift Wireless cloud based Air Conditioner Controller, allowing me to quickly change settings. No longer do I need to leave the heating or cooling on when I go out so that things will not be too hot or cold when I return. To be honest, thanks to the insulation and Sydney weathers, heating and cooling is not needed as often as it was. And when it is, I can remotely control the house from 15 minutes away so things will be fine when I return.

So, despite the lack of Carbon Tax in Australia now, I think you will find that industry does the analysis similar to what I did showing that there can be a positive environmental outcome with positive economic ones.