Posts Tagged ‘wa’
A new report issued today by the WA Auditor General reveals that a program to reduce energy use in WA Government agencies by 12% has only achieved a 0.1% reduction.
For those of you that prefer to think it terms of dollars and cents, that represents over $50 million in wasted energy over the last 7 years, or for the carbon-minded, 350,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
The Energy Smart Program was a brain child of the Gallop government. Introduced in 2002, its goal was to reduce energy consumption by 12% below 2001-02 levels by 2006-07 in agencies with 25 or more full time staff. The report states that whilst some agencies achieved the 12% target, these achievements were “offset by a lack of progress among the larger energy consuming agencies”.
The Auditor General lists a number of reasons for the failure of the scheme. In particular the report singles out the Sustainable Energy Development Office (SEDO), concluding that it was “not sufficiently strategic” in managing the program and using incentives and penalties to encourage agencies to reduce energy consumption.
“There were no consequences for failing to achieve expected results.”
For me this highlights a challenge we see every day at Greensense. Conservation of our resources, whether that’s energy or water, is a pretty abstract concept for most people and for many businesses. Traditionally our consumption of energy is not well understood — I challenge anyone to walk into their office and ask their colleagues how much energy their building consumes during a working day. The silence will be deafening — and, as we all know, its hard to manage a problem if it’s not well understood and good quality data isn’t available. If you don’t believe me, then ask yourself how successful you’d be with a diet if you didn’t weigh yourself regularly.
At Greensense we’re focussed on educating people in the language of energy conservation. Greensense View is all about increasing awareness of how the buildings we use every day are consuming energy and water, and what we can do to ensure they perform at their very best.
The energy minister has just announced the development of a new energy strategy for Western Australia, which is good news. The discussion paper is available now.
One of the goals of the strategy is to increase the level of renewable energy generation in the state to be in line with the Federal Government’s 20% Target by 2020.
Currently it is around 3.8% and lower still in regional areas. Based on the generation figures for 2008, there was 1066MW of new non-renewable generation in development versus only 41MW of renewable generation. It will be very interesting to see what actions the State Government might take to encourage more renewable generation.
One topic that seems to be entirely absent from the discussion paper is energy efficiency. Efficiency measures usually present cheaper and faster ways of reducing greenhouse emissions and use of fossil fuels and this will hopefully get a lot more attention in the final strategy.