Stuart Andrews

Stuart Andrews grew up in Brisbane, but spent most of his working life in Japan (25 years all up). He came back in 2010 to set up a business focused on design and manufacture of energy monitoring and data acquisition devices.

In recent years, he has become increasingly concerned with economic and political issues and the state of the world in general.

While living in Japan, Stuart learned a lot about energy efficiency and waste management. He believes Japan has an appalling track record on environmental issues: Minamata Disease, whaling, tuna fishing, the Fukushima power plant meltdown to name some. And yet, culturally speaking, they are natural conservationists. They have a knack for saving, improving efficiency, cutting costs and eliminating waste.

It was one of those contradictory aspects of the Japanese that he found so fascinating. They could happily deplete the world's oceans of every last whale; dice up a living fish, and eat it raw; and denude half the world's forests to keep them in paper tissues. Yet they will spend time every night carefully sorting their garbage by type: organic, burnable, paper recyclable, glass recyclable, can recyclable, electronic recyclable, large and small.

Their drive to conserve energy, in electronics, automobiles, heating and cooling has made them world leaders in energy conserving technologies. They even make the best batteries in the world —Tesla's "Powerwall" uses Panasonic Lithium cells.  And yet they appear morally ambiguous when it comes to things like deforestation and animal welfare. Of course these are generalizations, there are a lot of good people who do care, however there are strong cultural traits that seem to reinforce these stereotypes.

At any rate ignoring their abysmal record on some environmental issues, Stuart believes they have the right attitude to energy conservation and waste management. We could probably learn a bit there. Hence his interest in energy management technologies.