Saving trees!

It’s not often that one can be proud of lack of their own action. I know it sounds weird, but solar power plants make this possible. They collect the power, a crucial value in the universe, without requiring the owner to do anything physically. It’s remarkable 🙂

Jokes aside, I am indeed proud of the setup I have. Back in 2019., I’ve started a project of building my home. It was a massive effort, especially when other challenges are taken into account (new baby, pandemic, biggest earthquake in Zagreb in last 100 years, just 2km away from the new home). Being a civil engineer I knew that I’m building this home in a very seismically active area. I’ve done everything I could to be prepared for the quake, once it comes along. And it did, just 3 days after I made the last reinforcements in my new place (later followed by another one). But also, while I was preparing for the quake, I’ve decided to eliminate natural gas from the home. It came as a shock to many since it is the cheapest energy one can get around here, but… Quakes can destroy gas pipes and it’s not a long term solution for our energy needs. I already decided that my new car will be fully electric or at least PHEV. Therefore, I decided that I will reduce energy sources just to electricity and also to make an effort on producing it. There were also other factors I took into account; not being depended on external (political) factors, saving the planet since I can afford it, etc, etc…

I won’t go into detail about my heating and cooling system, automated air quality control and other gizmos, but I will note that starting with March 2021., we are finally making more electricity than we spend. The extra we make we send back into the grid. That way distributor in the end gets cheaper energy from us than they do from big producers. I’m not in it for the money, so they can get it almost at no cost.

And in April we managed to offset our carbon footprint by 400+kg and along the way we saved 11 trees. Those 11 trees will now pick up someone else’s carbon. If all goes well, considering the lifespan of the plant (20 years), I expect to save a whole forest – 2400 trees. You can track how well I’m doing over here.