Cheap Therapy

For 4 people:
Gas - 5.79 units/day
Water - 0.75 kL/day
Electricity - 11 units/day

The RAC are running a car battery recycling day on the 3rd of May 2008, just drop your battery off at an RAC Auto Service Centre.

So, individuals with solar panels don’t get a great rate when selling back to the grid (ie the Renewable Energy Buyback Scheme pays you less than what Synergy energy would charge for green power). What if they formed a co-op that sold the total sum of their contributions back to the grid? Would have more negotiating power for a better price, presumably.

This site lists some of the electric vehicles converted by members of the Perth branch of the Australian Electric Vehicles Association. The next meeting is 6:30pm Wednesday in the Billings Room at UWA’s Electrical Engineering department.

I was thinking today that if there was one thing that I’d like my kids (and really, pretty much everyone) to be able to do it would be to be able to wonder at the beauty in and of things. Pretty much anything really. Trees, rocks, whatever. Illuminated by light from a nearby star(!) (itself powered by nuclear fusion) that makes its way out from the core of the sun, streams through space, the atmosphere, hits the object and is reflected into the (improbably evolved) eye where it’s interpreted by an equally fantastic thing called a brain that exists, and is here and able to wonder about everything. And that’s ignoring the subatomic level, time, and lots of other cool stuff. Pretty much the more you know the more levels you can appreciate things on, and whatever way you cut it, existence is cool.

This USB powerboard plugs into a computer’s USB port and switches off the mains power to peripherals when the computer is turned off. AU$58.20.

I was somewhat amused by the press release about the Bentley Technology Precinct (”It will be Australia’s Silicon Valley - but with soul” - Minister Fran Logan, which wouldn’t be hard, most people in Silicon Valley probably leave the deserted landscaped wasteland or their corporate campus enclaves go to San Francisco for soul :). Given that I’ve previously worked in Bentley Technology Park, I thought I had some observations to make.

“Cafes, bars and restaurants will become boardrooms and central, shared facilities will provide mentoring and support for companies at all stages of commercialisation. Sustainable transport options will be explored and pathways expanded for a pedestrian friendly location.”

Well, when I was there there was one cafe, which served any sort of quiche (or egg-and-bacon pie), and pretty poor coffee (although unsurprisingly faster than UniClub). Pretty much everyone took their internal combustion engine vehicles to Karawara shops or Vic Park for lunch. Sustainable transport options (ie buses) didn’t run when you had to still go to work but Curtin University was on student break. Anyway , we don’t really need to ‘explore’ sustainable transport options, we already know which ones aren’t sustainable (cars with one person in them!).

As far as shared facilities go, when I was working in Tech Park the State Government stopped providing internet access to everyone, so most people wound up getting their own fibre laid (thankyou Amcom).

Mr Logan said numerous ICT companies from around the world were looking to move into the precinct.

The US-based company Interzone, which develops online entertainment products, has already established its game development studio within the precinct.

Cos games companies are cool at the moment and other states have them too so we’d better mention ours

A blog site has been created to promote discussion and participation.  

Comments can be made at http://www.communityofminds.com.au 

Edit - I realised the other thing I forgot to mention was the power! For a tech park you’d think they’d have a decent power supply, but it seemed like there were constant interruptions to the mains. Whilst it’s bad for a computer company it’s not insurmountable, but the biotech companies and the pathology labs can’t afford to lose power at all. It wasn’t long before they started installing their own diesel generators.

With power prices set to be hiked next year to better reflect their true environmental cost it seems a lot of people are putting grid connected solar power systems on their roof (noticed one on a new house just today as I walked home) and selling it back to Synergy as part of the Renewable Energy Buyback Scheme (REBS). I’ve discussed it with various people who have looked into it and discovered:

• Power is not sold into the grid at the rate Synergy charges consumers for NaturalPower (being 4.4c per unit above normal)
• Power sold into the grid gets you credit off your power bill. The credit cannot be exchanged for actual money (write your MP and complain). So there’s no incentive to try to generate more than you use, even though it saves the company on power generation and distribution costs, let alone the environment. You also only get 10/11ths of the agreed tariff to account for GST

Renewable energy buyback scheme PDF here. Info on the Photovoltaic Rebate Program is here. There’s also AU$500 subsidy for moving to a gas boosted solar hot water system.

Just in case you were wondering how your moggy got its spots. Or check out the cat colour calculator.

This morning Triple J were playing “The King is Dead” by The Herd, a song celebrating the downfall of John Howard. Highly recommended. IIRC “We partied like it was new years’ eve”