A Tesla battery totally powers his film production business 24/7 at VideoSpark. Both the residential and business premises are 100% solar powered and it boasts a zero need for grid power. In fact the operation actually exports surplus solar electricity to the grid.
“All of our film production cameras, lighting sound gear, field batteries, edit suite, file servers and comms gear is powered from solar via our Tesla battery,” Mr Fitzgerald said.
Mr Fitzgerald showed me a screen grab from his Tesla phone app showing the grid consumption for the month of October 2019.
“This shows that we drew 5.1KWh from the grid in total but we exported almost 1000kWh to the grid in October. The only reason that we draw anything from the grid is that we may have turned on a few heavy power appliances at the same time such as our aircon and our oven.”
“I had some solar panels installed a few years ago and that powered my business during daylight hours but not after dark and in situations where the blackouts occur.
“My business is very data intensive so the potential to lose work on outages is a risk. I bought the Tesla battery direct from Tesla.
“When winter rolled around I found that with the shorter days I wasn’t getting enough charge into the battery to carry my consumption through the 24 hour cycle. “I rang around the coast looking for a solar panel supplier that could engineer a solution to fit the battery.
“Quite frankly most of them had no idea how to engineer a solution they are just sales churn focused. Then I ran into Cameron from Freedom Solar and Batteries at the Linked In local networking evening at Erina and he knew exactly what I was about. He engineered a panel solution that gives me 24/7 solar generation and the battery does its bit after dark.”
The creative director and filmmaker at Videospark, Mr Fitzgerald has more than 25,000 hours of filmmaking behind him. He is a strong advocate for promoting film production on the Coast and believes the region has the talent and locations to be a major international player given the right opportunities.
