On the word of the day at Electro-Retrofit

Productivity is not the loveliest word. For most people, it summons harder work, less pay and all things unglamorous, except perhaps in the eyes of the economic nerds and bosses who rub their hands with glee.

But “hack”, now that’s kind of exciting – like the feeling of breaking a few rules and regs, or at least bending them, to achieve the same outcome. Usually, that signals faster, cheaper methods.  

There are entire websites on how to hack a certain prefab furniture outfit to get bespoke outcomes, not intended by the manufacturer. (Normally we’d not mention the company but since they seem quite keen on sustainability – yes, it’s IKEA.)

In truth though hacking is the same a productivity – doing more with less.

And that was the theme that popped to the top of the day at Electro-Retrofit. Here were all these clever engineers and adjacent experts creatively hacking their way through obstacles that only a few years ago were seen as impassable.

Just two years ago the industry kept saying a mere fraction of buildings could be transitioned to full electrification – 10-15 per cent at most among some cohorts.

On Tuesday, we heard 90 per cent could be electrified.

That’s how fast things are moving in this space. Despite the enormous heft of the built environment and its natural barriers to speed when big buildings take an eternity to plan, design and build, the creative evolution seems to move at the speed of light, comparatively speaking. Eat your heart out AI.

(Remember trigen gas plants? A brilliant innovation one day, canned and left idle the next, as someone on the day reminded us.)

The hacks people are coming up with electro-retrofits are faster and cheaper than ever.

In the chatter between sessions, we heard that even recently completed projects would probably be done quite differently today.

What they said

To set the scene for the urgent drivers behind the speed of change Monique Alfris, head of market transformation at NABERS, kicked off proceedings.

People were initially a bit nervous about the role of NABERS in electrification, she said.

“They didn’t want us to move that quickly. Fast forward to today. People are ready to go. They really want us to be doing as much as we can to support electrification.

“So yes, it really has happened very quickly. Blink your eyes and open again, and people are ready for the next step in this challenge.”

ADP director Alex Sear picked up the hacking theme with a myth busting presentation.

One such myth, he said, was that a particular building in Melbourne would be unable to get high NABERS rating, such was its apparently very poor sustainability profile, starting with possibly the worst performing “high performing” facades he’d ever seen: single, glazed curtain wall façade with mullions and transoms in steel, which makes them essentially “massive thermal bridges”. It would be hard to get a “facade worse than this”, he said.

“But this can operate at 4.5 stars NABERS and it doesn’t even have variable speed on a lot of the main control systems. It’s just metered well.”

This involves making sure that there are “nice landlord connections” to the plant, the building management system and analytics platform “so you can actually check that everything’s working”. That’s enough to get it to operate at a 4.5 star level and if you can’t, “You’ve either got some serious problems with your systems or something’s operating out of kilter.”

Another myth was that most buildings need an infrastructure upgrade to electrify. Not true. About 90 per cent of those his team has tackled don’t need such pricey upgrades, he said. Or that you need to “rip down the ceilings to change over the coils”.

A.G. Coombs’ Eoin Loughnane, who is head of advisory in NSW and ACT, shared a lively presentation spliced with videos and other visualisation on the challenge of electrifying the 83,000 square metre 101 Collins Street in Melbourne.  

If it sounds like a simple process to replace a domestic hot water system with an electric system, Loughnane showed it was anything but. From conception to completion was a five year program, with the installation started in April last year and the gas finally shut down in July.

The logistics of moving heavy equipment in Melbourne’s “Paris end of Collins Street” was just the start of the complexity.

The team also had to negotiate the challenge of the work proceeding without disturbing sitting tenants that included top end of town law firms and investment banks.

Among the solutions was the prefabrication of part of the plant that was needed to minimise work on site.

Wayne Lobo from Arup stepped the audience through the electrification of 111 Bourke Street Melbourne and issued some challenges to the audience along the way. For instance did they expect a high temperature heat pump would be a cheaper option as it was more simple to install or would it be the low temperature option, which involved significant new infrastructure installation?

The answer was counterintuitive.

The project’s owners Charter Hall and Brookfield chose to electrify the building after anchor tenant Australia Post had moved out. The work paid off with EY signing up to 20,000 square metres at least in part because the building aligned with the company’s sustainability ambitions – it was electric and it was an existing building.

It was at this point that some people in the audience might have started to suspect this was an event of Melbourne showing Sydney how things are done in this space!

Quite coincidental, we promise. But thankfully, director and global partner for Cundall, Julian Bott, took us next to a small commercial office project in Western Australia and then to Sydney with the hugely complex adaptive reuse project of 121 Castlereagh Street, on which his team was the sustainability consultancy.

This former David Jones store is being converted to retail office and apartments with the decision part way through the project to switch from “traditional gas and electric building”.

“So gas for basically hot water, heat, heating and the like, and even all the way through the planning and the detailed design remained that way, until about 2021 there was a suitable decision made to switch from gas to electric,” Bott said.

Sam Marks from Setmetrics delved into the complex and forever changing world of the technology that can maximise energy savings in commercial buildings along a range of other sustainability ambitions.

“As we all know, the expectations on everyone in this room are not reducing. Do it cheaper, do it faster, do it better…but how?” he asked.

One concept his company aspires to is an energy twin, or a “transparent workflow run by the owner and their trusted advisors to work through modelling.”

Yet another lively session closed the day. It was on another fast changing topic that needed hacking – EVs.

Mario Silvera, partnerships manager with JET Charge, stepped us through the tricks and traps of providing charging infrastructure for tenants and stakeholders in a range of property assets.

“What we sometimes forget,” he said, “is to draw the line between the value of EV charging and why it’s useful.”

“It’s not necessarily the money you make on EV charging … it’s about attracting and retaining tenants, pure and simple.” Especially in residential, he said, where some buyers or occupants will leave because they’ve got an EV but there’s nowhere to charge it.

Providing more power to a property might not be the answer. How the power is managed might be far more effective.

The panel

Bang in the middle of the day was the panel session where we heard about the kind of drivers that lead to the speed up of decarbonisation – or delay it.

On stage were Steve Ford ex GPT, Dave Palin from Mirvac, Tim Wheeler from the Clean Energy Finance Corporate and Chewy Chang from Charter Hall provided for some great insights.

More insights from that soon (members only).

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