Archive for June, 2010
Re-post from the excellent Skeptical Science:
Tonight, a public forum on climate change is being hosted by the University of Western Australia. Four scientists from the UWA will present short talks on climate change (fingers crossed they obey the mandate to keep it short). Afterwards, it’ll be thrown open to questions from the audience to a panel of local academics…and me (the initial idea was to broadcast the Skeptical Science iPhone app through the projector but the technology unfortunately failed us). The topics will be:Consensus in science: what does it mean?
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky (School of Psychology, UWA)
Time for accountability: junk science vs real science
Professor Kevin Judd (School of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA)
The scientific consensus: lessons from a warming planet
Professor Malcolm McCulloch (School of Earth Sciences, UWA)
The way forward: towards economic growth in a clean-energy future
Dr Volker Oschmann (senior government official within the German Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety)The forum will be at the Social Sciences Lecture Theatre from 6pm to 7.30pm so if you’re in the Perth area, please come along. For everyone else, the event will be recorded and compete audio/video will be made available at www.uwa.edu.au/climatescience.
It’s been an exciting week in politics with Kevin Rudd deposed and the appointment of Australia’s first female Prime Minister.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has said that she “will re-prosecute the case for a carbon price at home and abroad”, but that “rebuilding consensus” is a precursor to pricing carbon. This doesn’t give me any cause to think we will have an emissions trading scheme in the next couple of years, and if anything it suggests the Labor party might restart consultation and might consider a different policy direction entirely. A carbon tax, perhaps? After years of development and debate will the CPRS be abandoned?
Meanwhile, there is a renewed focus on energy efficiency. The Department of Climate Change was recently renamed ‘Climate Change & Energy Efficiency’. The (previous) Prime Minister established an energy efficiency taskforce and now new legislation has been passed for mandatory disclosure of building energy efficiency. Climate Works Australia, a non-profit ‘think tank’ found in their Low Carbon Growth Plan report that energy efficiency could save the Australian economy over $5 billion dollars by 2020. And the Energy Efficiency Council of Australia have just released their own report (PDF), which said that energy efficiency represented the “biggest, cheapest and fastest” way to cut greenhouse gas emissions and is now more urgent, “particularly with both major political parties delaying a carbon price”.
Perhaps while Julia Gillard is rebuilding consensus on a carbon price, we’ll see some new policies developed to further encourage energy efficiency?
Display Energy Certificate
In the UK, all public buildings greater than 1000sqm, such as schools, libraries, council buildings and hosptials are required to publicly display a display energy certificate. The energy certificates are like our NABERS Energy scheme in that they focus on actual energy use.
One government agency is going further. The Department of Energy and Climate Change is showing their energy performance in real-time on their home page. Like Greensense View, the DECC dashboard provides real-time feedback on energy use. For example, when I checked their website as I wrote this blog post, the energy they were using was responsible 231kg CO2e emissions per hour.
Greensense View can provide a public dashboard like this for your building right now. You can contact us to find out more or read more about Greensense View on our site. Greensense View has also just been listed the Energy Smart WA Directory.
The always excellent The Fifth Estate online green property newsletter has another great article this week: Apartment blocks the missing link in sustainability.
The author Lynne Blundell introduces the challenge for apartment blocks, saying:
“High rise apartment blocks, it turns out, are the biggest energy guzzlers in the residential market. But they are falling through the cracks when it comes to energy and water efficiency incentive schemes. It is something that local councils are acutely aware of while state and federal government appear to be turning a blind eye.”
While she provides a strong case that there is a big policy hole and some very specific challenges — such as the strata rules that govern changes to common areas, she mentions some really positive schemes too. Not unusually, it is local government that seems to be showing the way.
City of Sydney is providing funding for Green Strata Wiki to provide an online knowledge base about retrofitting existing apartment buildings. The council is also regularly running workshop for apartment owners with presentations from lawyers, water and energy companies and other sustainability experts.
Willoughby Council is also providing a grants scheme for improving the sustainability of apartments. The Climate Clever scheme has two parts – energy efficiency and solar photovoltaic, which provide dollar-for-dollar matching to successful owners corporations.
Sydney Water is piloting a programme called HiRise, which aims to improve the water-use efficiency of participating buildings by at least 10% by co-funding auditing, sub-metering and water efficiency improvements. According to Sydney water, one of the benefits of sub-metering is detecting leaks: “a leak could waste 73 kilolitres a day, amounting to $136 a day or $49,537 a year.”
One of the big challenges of sustainability upgrades is funding. Efficiency improvements will often pay for themselves over a few years, but owners corporations still need to find some capital upfront. This is still an issue when co-funding is available, such as with the schemes mentioned above.
Sustainability initiatives should start with measurement, whether that is an audit or better still installing sub-meters. A building dashboard. can help the owners corporation track energy and water used in common areas, and allow individual apartment owners to measure their own performance, compared to others in the complex.
Sub-metering can also open the door to a big financial benefit, which can help address the funding challenge.
Most residential apartment blocks in WA are on the standard residential electricity tariff with each apartment owner individually billed by Synergy. However, except for small apartment blocks, the total electricity used by these buildings will be above the ‘contestable level’ of 50,000kWh per year. This means the Owners Corporation could enter into a supply contract with another retailer at commercial rates.
Multi-residential buildings are quite attractive to retailers because the load profile is different to other commercial buildings and significant discounts on the standard residential tarrif are available. The discount can be as much as 40% in some cases. The owners corporation then needs to charge individual apartment owners for the electricity use along with their strata fees.
Our wireless sub-meters and energy monitoring dashboard can enable this kind of solution, help make apartment blocks more sustainable, and save money through efficiency and lower electricity prices.
