Archive for the ‘Climate Change’ Category
Over the past couple of weeks Eastern Australia has been racked by record flooding events and it has been hard not to get swept up in the emotion and momentum. With continuous media coverage we’ve seen more rivers peak, more levees break, more towns inundated and swarms of people aiding the recovery effort.
Looking beyond the human element and the tragedy of lives and livelihoods lost, we have seen multiple severe rainfall events wreak havoc on our infrastructure and economies. With the recovery expected to cost over $30 billion dollars and take years to complete, I hope we can learn from this and mitigate any future such events, not only in Eastern Australia, but also here in WA and Perth, despite the fact that floods are rarely seen here.
Depending on which newspapers you read or the blogs you follow, there are articles attributing the events in Eastern Australia to climate change, the La Niña weather patterns or even just the 1 in 100 year event that was bound to happen sooner or later. In general, there appears to be a consensus that there is a combination of these factors. In the medium term, we can expect El Niño and La Niña to signal periods of low and heavy rainfall across differing regions of Australia. In the longer term, it appears to be accepted that our climate is changing and we should expect these weather extremes more frequently.
Planning for these events should be a risk management exercise. At Greensense, it is a part of what we call Climate Change Adaptation. It is a process of considering a possible risk, the impacts and consequences of that risk occuring and how likely it is to happen. At the end of such an exercise, a business, community or government body should understand how resilient or vulnerable they are to various risks and should plan and adapt behaviours accordingly.
The difference between a standard risk assessment and a climate change risk assessment is that standard risk assessments consider risks under the current climate status quo. On the other hand, a climate change risk assessment takes into consideration forecast changes to climate such as increasing sea levels and changes to rainfall patterns. Often the likelihood and consequence of an event occurring may be altered in differing climate scenarios, and therefore the resulting action plan to address any vulnerabilities may be different under a climate change risk assessment.
Having watched the Eastern Australian floods play out over the last few weeks and knowing the recovery effort will be extensive, I would urge all businesses, organisations and government bodies to review their risk management processes and ensure that where you are evaluating a risk, sufficient consideration has been given to our changing climate.
If you are in south-west WA, where we are more accustomed to bushfires and storm surges, don’t forget to give consideration to floods. Following the events in the East, a quick look at Perth’s flood history shows a handful of serious flooding events on the Swan River in 1926, 1934, 1945 and 1963 with smaller, localised floods more recently. Despite the fact we’ve seen very little in the way of floods in Perth’s recent history, the risk is real and should be recognised.
The government announced its Low Carbon Communities program late last year. If you are a local council or you operate a community facility, it might be time to start thinking about potential projects that you could seek funding for under the program.
The Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency is currently in the process of developing the program guidelines, including determining how the learnings from funded projects and information about the benefits of energy efficiency can be shared. They will be consulting on the draft program guidelines in early 2011. We’d expect applications for funding to open before the end of this financial year.
You should probably start by dusting off your greenhouse gas reduction plans, energy efficiency strategies, and climate change adaptation plans to look for potential projects. As a reminder there will be three funding streams:
- Small scale grants of up to $500,000 for local councils to undertake smaller scale projects to reduce energy consumption in facilities such as outdoor lighting.
- Large scale grants of up to $5 million for operators of community facilities to invest in energy efficient upgrades such as the installation of cogeneration or new heating and air conditioning.
- Greener Suburbs grants of up to $500,000 for councils to implement capacity building and demonstration projects that improve the use of parks and green spaces in urban areas.
Grants will be competitive so it is worthwhile being prepared. By considering project opportunities in the context of your broader strategies you can maximise the benefits of any funding you obtain.
There are three ways Greensense can potentially help.
Firstly, we are preferred suppliers of climate change consulting services to WA local governments and have worked with many councils developing adaptation and abatement plans. If you would like to think strategically about building a Low Carbon Community we would love to help.
Secondly, if you have some projects in mind, we can help to develop implementation plans and business cases for these projects. Once the program guidelines are available, we can help you to prepare effective grant applications.
Lastly, our technology, Greensense View supports energy efficiency and is already implemented in many councils and community buildings including leisure centres, sports stadiums, libraries and community centres. As an eligible energy efficiency technology, you could apply for funding to implement Greensense View.
Alternatively, you might want to consider installing Greensense View ahead of your Low Carbon Communities grant application, particularly if you are interested in the large scale grants. Greensense View is very cost effective to deploy and the real-time profile information it provides would be invaluable in supporting a grant application for a more substantial upgrade of a building.
In any case, its time to start put your thinking caps on to think about how this new government policy can support the changes you want to make in your community.
One of the challenges in planning for climate change adaptation is understanding what the proposed scenarios really mean for our own neighbourhoods and regions. The Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency has just released a series of coastal maps to help with this problem for sea level rise.
The maps (available here)
identify the potential future impacts of climate change on some coastal regions around Australia. In particular, they show the areas likely to be inundated around Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, the Hunter and Central Coast and South-East Queensland with respect to three scenarios in 2100.
These maps will be a useful tool for coastal councils and organisations when planning for climate change adaptation. They will assist organisations in understanding how sea level rise is likely to impact on their operations and infrastructure, allowing more informed decisions on how to respond to these impacts.
If you live or work in one of these regions, why not check it out. You might be surprised by what you find. If you’re interested in knowing more about climate change adaptation for your organisation, feel free to get in touch with us here at Greensense.
With little fanfare, a modest deal has been done in Cancún, and unlike Copenhagen, COP16 will probably be remembered as a success. The outcome of Cancún was not a legally binding treaty, and to be fair this was never really expected, but it delivered some tangible and import agreements. And, perhaps just as importantly, it demonstrated that multilateral negotiations could be effective and paved the way more progress in Durban next year.
The Cancún Agreements build as much on the roadmap set out in Bali as they do on the slim accord thrashed out last year in Copenhagen. The text records the commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions that developed and developing countries made in Copenhagen, establishes a framework for transparency, sets up a global climate fund with the goal of providing $100 billion in financing to developing countries by 2020, and establishes REDD, an initiative aimed at curbing deforestation.
One sticking point in the negotiations was the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Kyoto is important because it is the only legally binding treaty we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and because it is the basis for current global carbon markets. However Kyoto doesn’t include developing nations or either of the two top emitters, the US and China, and so only covers around 30% of global emissions. Developing nations and the EU were calling for for a new round of commitments under Kyoto. Russia and Japan led the way opposing any extension to Kyoto. The question of Kyoto has now been left to Durban to resolve.
Meanwhile, greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing, and global warming continues, with 2010 now ranking as the hottest year on record.
While there are some great professional tools for planning and analysing carbon abatement projects, most organisations still seem to use Microsoft Excel. Excel is not a bad tool for abatement planning, but its not always clear the best way to use it.
I was assisting a client to develop their greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan last week and a specific question came up regarding how to chart a Marginal Abatement Cost Curve in Excel, like the one shown below.
A Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC) is the classic way to present a portfolio of abatement options. The MACC plots abatement potential (X-axis) against the marginal abatement cost (Y-axis). The marginal abatement cost represents the dollar cost to abate one tonne of greenhouse gas emissions (that is, abatement potential divided by economic cost). There are quite a few good descriptions and examples of MACCs out there. One good recent report is Climate Work’s Low Carbon Growth Plan for Australia.
Once you have calculated the economic cost and abatement potential of each option, actually charting the cost curve is pretty simple. The trick is arranging the data so you can use the the standard Column chart type. This means you need to provide a value (the marginal abatement cost) for each tonne of carbon based on each projects abatement potential and with the projects ordered from least-cost to most-cost. This is illustrated below.
So, in the example above, Project A can abate up to 60 tonnes of carbon at a cost of -$90.50 per tonne (i.e. there is net economic benefit); Project B is the next best option and can abate up to a further 40 tonnes of carbon at a cost of -$5.00 per tonne; and so on.
Often you will have a separate Excel worksheet for each project and it can be a bit of work getting the data out of these individual worksheets into this arrangement so it is easy to chart. You can use macros, conditional sum formulae, or just copy the values manually.
When you get to actually creating the chart, use the standard Column chart type and format the data series so that there is no separation and no gap between the data points. If you like, you can download a very simple Sample-MACC-Chart to see what I mean.
The Environmental Institute of Australia and New Zealand (EIANZ) are running a climate change leadership forum on November 23rd, on tools, techniques and leadership lessons on climate change adaptation and mitigation. Greensense Managing Director, Derek Gerrard, will be presenting on smart technologies and behavioural change, reviewing the Subiaco Oval case study, as well as our carbon emission’s reporting solution for Local Government in partnership with WALGA.
If you haven’t registered and would like to you can find out more information here.
Click to watch the interview
A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned our energy saving project at Pattersons Oval. Since then Derek, our MD, and Geoff Glass, the Director of Facilities at WA Football Commission were interviewed about the project by The West.
You can click on the photo to the right and hear about how the increasing cost of electricity in Western Australia means that systems like Greensense View make great economic sense. If you’d like any more information about the project, feel free to contact us or e-mail Derek directly.
Today the Federal Government announced $80 million dollars to help local councils and communities to make energy efficient upgrades to street lighting, community facilities, and council buildings. Details of the new scheme can be found in the Fact Sheet (PDF).
Successful applicants will need to report on the energy they have saved, and use their experience and project plans to help similar facilities undertaking these upgrades in the future. Greensense View ® is already used by eight local government authorities to monitor energy and water use in community buildings in real-time. Greensense View can also be used to monitor streetlights. It provides a great way to help target energy efficient upgrades for maximum impact, and to engage stakeholders and tell the story about the improvements that are being made
In a first for stadiums Australia-wide, the West Australian Football Commission has recently installed our real-time energy monitoring platform, Greensense View, to measure and reduce the ground’s energy consumption.
As venue managers, the WAFC implemented this system to identify ways of increasing energy efficiency, reducing environmental impacts and saving costs. The operational savings gained from more responsibly managing Western Australia’s premier sporting facility can then be reinvested into new initiatives and programmes.
Geoff Glass, the WAFC’s Director of Facilities and Planning is encouraged by the project and the opportunities it presents.
“The Greensense project at Patersons Stadium has allowed us as venue managers, to better understand our energy usage and will provide staff with real time feedback on energy consumption. It will also stimulate ideas and ways for all venue occupiers to explore further savings in energy usage and greenhouse emissions,” says Geoff.
The ongoing project will go a long way toward Patersons Stadium achieving maximum returns both economically and environmentally, by first building an informed and effective management. At a time of change for the Stadium, these greener changes are not only ground-breaking for our State’s home of football, but will also inspire and show the way for other AFL and sporting venues Australia-wide.
Everyone knows efficiency is a good thing, right? By being more efficient we can get the same outcome with less resources: the same illumination in our homes with less energy, the same production of widgets in our factory with less waste, the same recreation spaces with less water.
Stanley Jevons isn’t so sure. He was a British economist who in 1865 pointed to the experience of the Scottish iron industry who had significantly improved their efficiency, in terms of coal per tonne, but at the same time actually increased their consumption of coal. This phenomenon has come to be known as Jevons paradox.
Earlier this year, a scientific article by Jeff Tsao looked at the effects of more efficient lighting technology over the last 300 years. He found that introduction of more efficient lighting had actually increased the energy consumption associated with lighting. Exactly as Jevons would have predicted.
As we are able to produce more light with less energy and less cost, we take the opportunity to increase the amount of light we generate. More efficient lighting has enabled us to literally ‘light up the night’ and provided us much more amenity and enabled 24 hour lifestyles. The conclusion of Tsao’s paper is that we should expect the transition to LED lighting to increase, rather than decrease, energy consumption.
You shouldn’t draw the conclusion that efficiency improvements are bad. Producing more with less is what has enabled economic growth, and what is helping to lift millions out of poverty. But, when one of our goals is to improve sustainability and reduce resource use, we can’t expect an efficiency improvement alone to achieve that end.
What else do you need to do? How can you beat Jevons paradox?
The answer is to restrict the use of the resource, while the efficiency improvement allows you to still achieve the output you need. This restriction might be in the form of a cap, like the cap on greenhouse gas emissions in an emissions trading scheme. It might be a price increase that acts as a countervailing force to the efficiency improvement. Or, it might be a monitoring and reporting/disclosure scheme like NABERS.
In practical terms, this means that when you are making investments in improving efficiency, you should also give thought to how you will monitor and restrict resource use. Our real-time resource monitoring solution, Greensense View, might be part of the solution. Feel free to contact us and find out how.
A carbon price is back on the drawing board in Canberra. Julia Gillard’s (supposedly) multi-party committee is exploring options right now. But unless you are particularly optimistic, or are suffering short-term memory loss regarding Labor’s last inspiring attempt to get some legislation passed, its hard to see a scheme being in place before 2013.
I say supposedly multi-party, because members of the committee will be drawn from “those who are committed to tackling climate change and who acknowledge that effectively reducing carbon pollution by 2020 will require a carbon price”, which doesn’t include the Nationals or the Liberals.
Its not entirely clear if the opposition’s opposition to the committee is because climate change is “crap” or because they don’t accept the premise that pricing carbon is the way to go. Sophie Mirabella called it a “marxist plot” on Q&A, which gives us a reasonable insight into the Coalition’s point of view.
Meanwhile, I was inspired by this poster from a mass political rally in the US recently.
Whilst most businesses and employees here in WA will have been enjoying last Monday off for the Queens Birthday public holiday, for many of our commercial buildings it was business as usual. The building management system (BMS) that manages the air conditioning, turns on the lights or powers up the lifts, is often blissfully unaware that its a public holiday and the building is actually empty. Significant energy (and dollars) are wasted as a result.
I took a moment to look over some data from one or two of the Greensense View® dashboards of our clients, and sure enough it didn’t take long to find an example of a BMS hard at work when it should be taking the day off. The image below shows the energy profile for one of our clients for the current week. Remember that Monday 27 was a public holiday.
The facility in question is a fairly typical office building. In this chart, we are separating out electricity used by the air conditioning system (the green data series) from general power used by office lighting, pcs and so on. You can clearly see that on Monday the air con fired up a little after 7am, just as it normally would, and ran through until the end of the business day, even though the office was empty. When you consider there are around 10 public holidays in WA each year, the wasted energy for this building alone would total more than $1000 a year.
So whilst a correctly configured and maintained BMS can be vital in helping to run a building efficiently, an incorrectly configured system can be worse than none at all. Naturally, when a building is being run for us by a computer, we often stop questioning what exactly is going on and simply trust that the computer is doing the right thing. This example highlights that this is not always the case and there are often good opportunities available to reduce energy waste simply by ensuring the computers we use to run our buildings are doing the right thing.
Many people install solar PV systems at their home or work, but do not have an easy way to monitor its performance. Most solar inverters only have a very small display and these are often very difficult to use and identifying short term or long term trends is extremely difficult.
Our Greensense View® dashboard can be used to monitor green power solar generation by displaying power being generated in real-time, as well as long term trends, on simple, easy-to-understand charts. This is of immense value for engaging with people on many different levels, but better still is that behind the scenes we collect additional technical information that can be used to manage the performance of a solar installation and diagnose issues.
One of our customers has a 30kW solar PV system. They are using Greensense View® to monitor on-site energy generation and consumption of electricity from the grid. Their dashboard was clearly showing that the solar panels were not performing as expected, and were not producing electricity on some fine, sunny days when you’d normally expect energy production to be at its highest.
The chart below shows two consecutive sunny days. The first day shows a normal profile. The energy produced is a nice curve peaking in the middle of the day. On the next day, just before 9am the system stops producing energy, and stays off until almost 3pm, missing the best part of the day.
In fact we can quantify this loss exactly. On the first day, 160.5 kWh of energy were produced, and on the second day only 37.5 kWh were produced. On the second day additional electricity had to be purchased from the grid to make up the shortfall from the on-site generation. The additional cost for that one day of lost generation was approximately $42, based on Synergy R3 Tariff peak-time. If you extrapolate this out over a year, this behaviour could have a direct cost of over $15,000, dramatically increasing the payback time for the solar panels.
So you can see that it is important to measure and monitor these systems to ensure the return on investment is achieved as expected and that corporate emissions reductions expected from the installation of this equipment are actually being met.
We narrowed down the problem for them by analysing the data we had been collecting. The issue in this case was a voltage cut-out. To be connected to the grid, the grid owner, in this case Western Power, needs to approve the inverter and there are obviously criteria that need to be met in this process. One of these criteria is cut-out at a low or high voltage threshold. The inverters need to automatically shut down if the voltage goes above 254 V and can switch themselves back when it returns below this level.
The chart below shows generation on one of the three phases overlaid with the voltage for that phase. It can be clearly seen that when the voltage rises above 254 V the inverter stops supplying electricity.
High voltages can also be damaging for other equipment on site as well, so the potential loss from leaving this unresolved is significantly greater.
Without Greensense View® monitoring the system in real-time, these problems can go undetected for long periods of time. Identifying the problem is half the solution, so armed with the right information, the client can now take remedial action.
Greensense View, our technology for real time monitoring of sustainability performance, has been built around a foundation that if building users have real-time, relevant information on their electricity, gas and water use, that information will drive behaviour change that results in greater resource efficiency.
A key part to this is the idea of behavioural change or behavioural economics. We believe that, while investment in technology and infrastructure are an important part of energy efficiency, a lot of benefit can be gained by engaging with your facility occupants and getting back to basic behavioural changes. Greensense View supports this by providing real time information that gives a baseline, and allows facility occupants to receive immediate feedback on how any changes impact energy use.
With that in mind — we want to introduce you to the Nudge. The Nudge was an idea originally conceived by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. A Nudge is about self consciously moving people in a direction that will make their lives better. It is a mechanism to promote desirable outcomes while respecting individual choices. We have used the Nudge as a concept in Greensense View and supporting the energy efficiency initiatives we are involved in with our clients.
We present four types of nudges that we believe should be used in combination to achieve the desired outcomes. There are:
1. Fun: this is abut positively engaging with your building occupants and finding innovative and fun ways to drive change, often with incentives.
2. The Stick: this about using policy or punishment to drive change.
3. Compelled: this is about creating a social norm, where everyone changes because everyone else is moving that way.
4. Informed: this is about providing information that causes someone to change their behaviour because of a new insight to the situation.
Here are some great example of nudges that use some or all of the above techniques:
For more information on how the Nudge and Greensense View work together please contact us.
A recent study from Syracuse University found that improving peoples understanding of energy use and savings could pay large dividends.
The study found that most people don’t really understand the energy use associated with activities like switching off lights and appliances, and energy efficiency improvements, like switching to more efficient appliances. On average, participants in the study underestimated energy use and savings of common activities by almost three times, with larger underestimates for high-energy activities.
Greensense View Example Dashboard
We think part of the answer is providing people with real-time feedback on their energy use. That’s why we developed Greensense View. We’re holding an event on Tuesday next week on Smart Technologies and Behavioural Change, if you’d like to find out more.
You can download the full paper from this study (PDF) from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
