I used to worship efficiency. For years as a control systems engineer, I sweated over fractions of a percent, shaving seconds off processes and optimising production lines.
Now I look around and realise: efficiency is dead. Killed by cheap solar and ever-cheaper batteries.
It pains me to admit that efficiency has lost. It has been beaten, hands down, by cheap generation and cheap storage.
The example that hammered this home for me this week? An Aussie who bought a 30 kWh home battery so he can both power his home and recharge his car every night. A battery charging a battery. That sound you hear is every efficiency nerd screaming into a pillow.
Rational But Wasteful
Would it be more efficient and better for the planet to simply plug the car in while it’s parked at work? Of course. But workplaces rarely have chargers. And he likely can’t control how many chargers are in his work car park. What he can control is slapping an oversized battery in his garage. Rational? Yes. Efficient? Absolutely not.
(Tune in next week, and I’ll explain why, without specialist configuration, he’ll still pull from the grid every night, even with his monster battery.)
I’m Guilty Too
Confession time: I own a solar pool cover designed to prevent heat loss. It stays rolled up most nights. Instead of rolling it out before bedtime, I just hammer the heat pump all day off my 20 kW array to make up for the overnight cooling. It’s lazy. It’s wasteful. It works.
Lifestyle and laziness beat efficient living. That’s the story now, and I’m guilty as charged.
In my defence, I do have a thermally efficient home. The comfort of a sensibly sized, well-insulated home with proper thermal mass and tight seals is a beautiful thing. You have to live it to appreciate it.
But it is a tough sell to convince homeowners to spend tens of thousands fixing their home’s gaps, glazing and insulation when they can just bolt 20 kW of solar to the roof, throw a big-ass battery in the mix, and run a ducted reverse-cycle off free energy until the place feels like a Westfield in summer. Efficiency is out. Brute force is in.
My home in Adelaide features a raft of energy efficiency innovations, but for many Australians brute force solutions are winning out.
The Easiest Path Always Wins
You can’t fight human nature. Efficiency feels virtuous, but most people will always choose the easy path. And right now, the easy path is simply to oversize your solar, battery and appliances and get on with life.
The truth is, efficiency was fragile all along. It only works when people have no alternative. The moment the lazy option got cheap enough, efficiency collapsed.
Do I like it? No. But results are what matter. If plastering our suburbs with solar and stacking batteries in garages cuts emissions and reduces particulate pollution, then it’s hard to argue against it.
Buying a monster home battery just to charge your EV might look inefficient – maybe even silly – but it’s still miles better than the laziest option of all: buying another petrol car.
Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column by SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock. Subscribe to SolarQuotes’ free newsletter to get it emailed to your inbox each week along with our other home electrification coverage.
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Yes, I’m guilty as charged too… living off-grid most of my life meant being super efficient but now with the low cost of solar and batteries, I take the attitude of “use it or loose it” and now use inefficent panel heaters just to burn off the surplus power so the system can cycle another day.
Yeah, i remember a dim distance past when i used to turn off lights when i left a room, didn’t turn on my air conditioners unless i had guests or it was over 35. Nervously awaited each quarterly power bill. We made part payments each month so we were on top of it and didn’t have to scramble to pay the bill when it arrived.
These days i run most of the lights all day because, well why not! same with the air cons, come summer they run every night and days if i am at home.
It costs me nothing and being older these days, i see better in brighter light. Solar and the battery have transformed my life.
And those Power bill’s? Well all the election bribe money from the last couple of years sitting in the account as a credit will probably pay the next 2 years worth of network charges. After that maybe technology will have improved enough going off grid will be viable, unless there are more election bribes of course!.
Yep, I have been having this ‘debate’ for a while now.
Why spend thousands on double glazing or insulating your underfloor or building to Passivhaus standard when the same comfort can be gained for around $20k of solar and storage.
I have spent decades slowly upgrading our house to a very low energy use home and now find I am spilling energy from 10am most days.
Sure, we need to ensure we are doing better than building glorified tents but let’s not get bogged down reaching for ten stars.
Interesting, and yes, you’re correct … (but only up to a point.)
It’s still true though that efficiency does matter, because a watt saved is one you don’t have to generate and store to use. When the weather is very inclement, even a massive solar system won’t generate much power.
Many people can NOT have solar and battery, such as renters and unit dwellers, or people struggling to pay the bills and mortgage each week.
Efficient airconditioning makes a big difference.
Using aircon wisely makes a big difference.
Efficient appliances make a big difference.
And even efficient lighting makes a big difference.
And an efficient electric car makes a big difference. (Some have HUGE batteries and consume a hell of a lot of energy compared to others.)
So all of these efficiency gains combined are what I would argue make living off solar and battery possible.
And finally I’m still horrified when I hear how much energy some households use!
“But workplaces rarely have chargers.”
In Canada it’s the opposite. Almost all workplaces have a row of plugs for car engine heaters.
But they only deliver 1400 watts continuous, per circuit. And some are thermostat controlled to shut off, if the air temperature warms up to -10 C.
One of the reasons I ended up with a Tesla vehicle was their superb efficiency. Other EV makers are doing what you’re describing, adding much larger batteries to compensate for poor efficiency.
With G2V, I’m one of many I’m sure whose home solar is sitting alone all day while I’m at work, exporting back to the grid. It’d be nice to be able to credit your own production against any work-based charging.
As a coder decades ago, we would scrutinise code to be efficient because computing hardware was expensive. Today it’s a different story, hardware is cheap so efficient code is not a concern.
The same goes for solar, it’s cheap and abundant and quality is redundant.
There’s a new book, Abundance, that all the politicians and government officials in Australia are reading right now. The idea is to give everybody heaps and heaps of the good life. And apparently, the way to do that is through (smarter and fewer) government regulations.
Anyway that’s the current trend, abundance.
The other note about abundance. Back at university engineering, my teacher drew a pie graph, with a 98% slice and a 2% slice. They represented non-solar and solar power. This was decades ago before PV solar took off.
Then he pointed out that our assumption was backwards. The 98% was solar power, and the 2% was “other”.
His point: 98% solar included lighting and heating the planet during the daytime. If we didn’t have a sun, it would be perpetual night and we’d need to find a lot of power generation to cover that.
My point: abundance. There’s so much solar to go around.
This was foreseeable, but perhaps not obvious to efficiency lovers. I used to be one until . . . . .
In 2018 I purchased a very efficient 65 inch Sony TV for our new house. I had done a lot of research and not only did the TV appear technically ahead of the field (albeit in Sony’s lower tech stream) but its operating and standby figures were great. It had standby of 10W for about 10 minutes, after which it dropped to something under 2W. And it was on sale.
This was well under half of my then current TV running costs. So did I contribute this windfall to reducing demand on the grid? Well yes, for about 12 months. Then I purchased a second TV (on sale), because I needed (wanted) a Google compatible TV. So I was still morally ahead wasn’t I? I consumed less (just) what I would have been had I kept the original TV. But now I had a second TV for the family.
Win win: not really, but it is human nature. I’m my defence, I still have both TVs. But am checking out new televisions . . . .