ELECTRO-RETROFIT: The exciting thing about productivity and doing more with less is the ingenuity it flushes out.
For instance, at 111 Bourke Street in Melbourne, owned by Charter Hall and Brookfield, Wayne Lobo and his team from Arup were able to shave around $200,000 from the cost of new electric plant installation on the roof of the building simply by shifting its location.
Lobo will also explain the counterintuitive quirks his team uncovered during the selection process between a new high temperature hot water heat pump system and a low temperature option. There are things the manufacturers don’t specify, he shared in a candid briefing this week. The savings involved in the final selection were more than just in dollar terms – they involved a lot of embodied carbon savings as well.
Charter Hall’s Ben McCluskey will be on hand for the leaders panel to reveal the owner’s side of the decision making.
What about EV charging? If everybody needs to electrify, EV charging is key to the solution. It’s especially important if you need to drive to work and want to avoid charging your EV at home at night when the grid is running on dirty coal fired electricity.
Carola Jonas, who founded Everty, now owned by AGL, knows that providing these services, whether at work, in shopping centres or at home in an apartment building, needs to be as efficient and seamless as possible.
Technology is key, she says.
Jonas will share insights into the kinds of technology that can avoid the need to add huge additional electricity capacity to the building to cope with EV charging.
Load management or smart charging, she says, can “optimise the distribution of electrical power to EVs, especially when multiple vehicles are charging simultaneously.”
It means that available power is shared equally according to demand at the time. The benefits included are multiple, but the biggest is the ability to avoid the need for big supplementary energy installations in the building.
There are several other benefits to this, including the ability to prevent tripping breakers when multiple EVs are charging.
In commercial fleets, they can ensure all vehicles are ready when needed without overloading the system, and in public charging stations, they maximise charger availability and grid stability. She says.
Jonas will also delve deeper into the different types of load management and how they will work for different projects.
Early bird ends Thursday COB so book in your ticket now!