The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand

I thought it might be interesting to see if the households of different states were more or less "green". We can look at carbon dioxide emissions, but those don't always give a clear picture if we're talking about households; someone from Kiama in New South Wales can't really help it if Newcastle is the biggest coal exporting port in the world. So let's look at what households can control directly.

Since 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions in Australia can be attributed to electricity generation, and since water stress is so significant to us (every state is building desalination plants), two good measures of how "green" we are in our households is how many of us choose "green" sources of electricity, and how much water we use each day.

The GreenPower program in Australia is a federal accreditation system where companies buy electricity generated from solar, wind, and so on. This must be "new" generation, that is, from sources built after 1997. That's so they can't just buy it from some hydroelectric plant built in 1950, and to encourage the building of new generation.