My Studio is proudly carbon neutral
I acknowledge that we are in a climate emergency and that climate change is real, so as a business owner, I want to tread as lightly as possible in the environment I operate in. I do this by making a concious effort to ensure that my business is doing all that it can to minimise its carbon footprint whilst it is in operation.
In 2021, Visionary Creative became a ‘Zero Emissions’ studio thanks to an investment in a big 9.9kw solar system (see image on the right).
The large system enables me to power my home, my office and also my company EV from the sun’s rays therefore relying as little as possible on Melbourne’s electricity grid.
The system I have invested in is called “Solar Edge” and one of the benefits of choosing this solar system, was that it comes with a linked app. The app give us live power usage data which allows us to monitor how much power the home office is using at any moment.
This enables us to use as little energy as possible by allowing us to choose optimal times of the day for usage and charging items like computer, lights, electric vehicle, phone, e-bike etc. to ensure that we can avoid pulling the power from the grid.
But what happens if there is no sun?
The home office uses around 0.2kw to run during the day or and 0.3kw at night. This is made up of four main items, office lighting, office computer, office heating / cooling and the office fridge.
The system makes between 1kw when there is no sun and 9kw when the sun is out, so even on a cloudy day (like this screen shot to the right shows), we are able to produce much more energy than what we use therefore effectively offsetting our power use. The excess energy we’re producing is fed back into the grid.
Over the year this equates to 12.5 MWh of energy production and usage for the whole building (including home and home office) is around 4-5MWh. See data below for more detail.
Our energy production vs. our energy use
2022
We produced a total of 12.6 MWh
We used a total of 5.14 MWh
(That’s for the entire entire building 24/7).
2023
We produced a total of 12.4 MWh
We used a total of 4.91 MWh
(That’s for the entire entire building 24/7).
The months of the year are numbered 1-12 in the bar graph and as you can see, even in the winter months, the production of energy far exceeds use.
What's the bigger picture?
Since the system has been installed (approximately 2.5 years ago), the studio has managed to save 19,795.5kg Of Co2 emissions – that’s the equivalent of planting 384 trees!
