Tag: Energy

Articles covering NZ’s energy supply and retail sectors.

Understanding limitations and nuances of renewable power

I guess a theme that is emerging from this blog and from my life in general is around the whole idea of how hard it is to actually go green, how many ideas need to be trialled and discarded before you come up with a way, a simple clearcut unequivocal way, to make a meaningful dent in your carbon emissions.

It can be discouraging. Often, it’s a process of two steps forward, one step back, as are most things in life. It requires a lot of math to go green meaningfully. But it has many side benefits, and for me anyway, is a worthwhile side project.

I am always on the lookout for scalable strategies – stuff that might work, but that people might not have tried in detail before. And I like to produce honest case studies based on my experience. Sometimes the failure is more interesting than the success.

As I go through each one of these processes, constantly scanning for new content, I learn not only about the benefits of a thing but also the limitations and drawbacks. I learn that the process of going green is very much circumstance dependent.

It’s all part of a bigger long term vision. The other morning while I was writing in my diary at a cafe, I had a vision of all of Kapiti uniting as a single city, with the bright lights powered by renewable energy. The small things we do today I think create the future. The little tests, little experiments, build wisdom and resource for something far grander.

But the hard work and hard math has to be done first. Building the green city of Kapiti involves coming to an understanding about the limitations and nuances of renewable power. As much as anything.

An Entrepreneur’s Diet

During the early days of a start up you want to make sure as much capital as possible is kept on the table. At the same time you want to make sure you have enough energy and nutrition to carry out a 14 hour work day.

My question is, what is the best way to do this? I’ve worked with entrepreneurs in the past who in the early days of their business subsisted off tins of beans. While I do think legumes hold the key, tinned beans alone won’t sustain you for long.

Is it possible to feed one person for a week on the equivalent budget of a tin of beans?


Black bean soup
4-5 healthy servings
Celery 90c
Carrots 50c
Onion 50c
1 cup Black lentils 80c
Water
Stock cubes 75c or real stock (free)
Salt and pepper

If you can make it go 5 meals you have a whopping recipe for 69c per serving.

Pumpkin lentil soup
4-5 servingsPumpkin $2
Onion 50c
Celery 90c
Carrot 50c
Yellow Lentils 80c
Stock cubes 75c or real stock (free)

Not a huge fan of pumpkin soup but I’ll eat it if I have to. Not going to lie, this type of diet requires some sacrifices. $1.09 per serving without bread.

I could go on forever, but these are two example recipes that cost less than a $1.20 can of beans.

So the key to a successful enterprise diet, it seems, is having a lot of pre-made stock & legumes up the wazoo.

Needless to say the entrepreneur’s diet is a legume-centric vegetarian diet. The same as baked beans.

If I assume 21 meals in the week, such a diet should get me through at about $19-20 per week and can mostly be made in my slow cooker.

The real challenge with the entrepreneur’s diet would be staying on the diet until the business makes a profit – but boy, would that give you motivation to make a profit.

Reducing the mass of vehicles on the road might contribute to a climate change win

This little epiphany occurred to me when I was reconsidering some of the past work I had done on ebikes. Ebikes are incredibly eco-efficient when compared to petrol cars and even electric vehicles, not just because they utilise electric power as well as pedal-assist, BUT ALSO because the vehicle itself has a far lower mass than virtually all motor cars. In fact, I calculated in a previous blog article that an electric bike is roughly 21 times more eco-efficient than a Nissan Leaf. 

Currently, most climate change goals focus on switching petrol cars to the electric fleet. An equally valid goal might be to reduce the overall mass of motor vehicles on the road by a certain date. 

But if you think about it, what really does the damage when a car drives is not the fuel type that a vehicle consumes, but the amount of mass of that vehicle. The greater the mass, the more energy required to motor the vehicle. 

Putting incentives in place to get people to switch down from large gas guzzlers to smaller, more eco-efficient vehicles, even if those vehicles still run on petrol, could in some ways be very effective and another way (on top of the switch to renewable energy vehicles) that one could compound the reduction in carbon emissions from more efficient vehicle use. 

Switching to an ebike has reduced my carbon emissions from travel by around 900 kilograms last year. It has also saved me a pretty penny in fuel expenses. 

The point is that there are vectors to reducing carbon emissions through motor vehicle use that are not currently being considered and that ought to be forefront of people’s minds. 

Did CRC improve my ebike battery efficiency by 35%?

I noticed this on my way in to work this morning. December was a very busy month for me, and with the ebike having heavy use, I nonetheless had very little time to give it the TLC it deserved. In particular, I fed it no CRC across about 7 weeks and at the end of it the ebike was squeaking like a baby mouse.

My standard trip into work during this period consumed around 35% of the battery charge. This would leave me enough charge to get home and enough to pop down to the shops if I needed to.

Last night I applied CRC for the first time in a while. The result this morning was that the bike rode incredibly freely, with far less squeak, and in addition to that, only took me a 26% charge to get to work!

That is an improvement in battery efficiency (for the same ride, on the same settings) of just under 35%.

While this won’t make much practical difference in how I use the bike, the implications are massive.

It means I could go an extra 10 kms to and from with a well maintained bike for each recharge.

It also means that problems I attribute to the battery may in fact just be not enough oil on the chains.

I’ve always applied CRC in the past more as a chore, rather than something that could actually help me. I didn’t realise that by failing to apply CRC I was making my bike ride a third harder!

But now with ebike batteries, these sorts of minor things are much easier to quantify.

What is the ROI of a rice cooker (solar powered) with calculators

So my solar powered slow cooker diet is going well, with loads and loads of stress free and delicious food experiments under way, utilising great local organic Kapiti produce. I wanted to take a further step in the sustainability direction, so I bought myself a rice cooker to work along with the solar panels.
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Let’s have a look at Z’s annual report

I’ve heard our Prime Minister is preparing law to enable the Commerce Commission to have a sweeping set of powers to investigate fuel businesses and collect information on their profit margins. Did you know that this information is already freely available in the company’s annual report? You can access this information without the need for law changes that will force new compliance costs and ultimately the cost of doing business in New Zealand up higher than it has been recently. More importantly, you are guaranteed the information is accurate, since if a public company lies to its shareholders it gets sued.

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We saved 487 kWh this month

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.

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My Biggest Mistake With Solar Panels

Installing solar isn’t all plain sailing. In addition to the complexities of matching energy production to energy use, and the huge amount of math that goes into crunching whether you will or won’t break even, there are other obstacles. This article is about the biggest ‘trap for young players’ that I fell into when installing solar.

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Our plan to cut winter heating costs by 67%

I like to think of a motel as one big eternal cost-cutting operation. The way we can afford to pay our staff more is by keeping overheads as low as possible.

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Winter energy consumption planning

Last year, because of the dry winter and its concomitant effect on hydroelectric energy generation, New Zealand burned its way through a significant portion of its coal reserves, resulting in the release of significant amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. At the household level, because of massive pressure on household winter energy consumption, winter energy bills shot through the roof, leaving families across the country out of pocket if they didn’t plan ahead and budget.

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