News from the front desk: Wednesday masterclass #4 on precincts was both exhilarating and challenging.
CleanPeak Energy’s Philip Graham rounded off an excellent session with a deeply generous presentation on the nuts and bolts of his company’s investments in the energy systems of Barangaroo, Central Park in Sydney and Tonsley Innovation District in Adelaide.
Generous, because of the detail and the incisive views he shared. But provocative too, when he noted that a new report showed Australia is falling well short of meeting its renewable energy target and that getting big renewable energy projects off the ground is getting so much harder.
Cost of funds is one factor, but the other might also be the backlash from people (who say they are greenies) who don’t want to see power line transmissions going through their farm as in Victoria, even if the energy from a solar farm. Nor wind turbines offshore.
In Victoria’s Western District coastal town of Portland, community and scientists are trying their best to stop an offshore windfarm that they say threatens endangered whales and eco systems.
The concern is ecological though the embodied carbon angle has been raised.
A windfarm is proposed for an area “covering a massive 5100 square metres of pristine Southern Ocean, 10 kms offshore,” a media release says.It’s an area rich in marine life and bird life, “an oasis for endangered whales and seabirds, including the southern right whale and the blue whale”, along with other species.
The proposal, by the federal government, is for 214 wind turbines, each 300m high, and embedded about 30 metres into the seabed.
The turbines “will never be carbon neutral and will pollute our oceans with all the coal/oil burning vessels which will be required to service them” the statement says.
It’s not the first time we’ve been hammered by accusations that the embodied carbon in wind turbines is way more than carbon they save. The first time we called an academic at ANU and received a vociferous rejection of this “rubbish”. Think about how much damage a coal mine does, he shouted, think about what fossil fuels are doing to the whole planet!
This time we asked Phil Oldfield head of school, built environment University of NSW.
“The thing with the windfarms is this,” he said: “all construction and energy sources have some environmental impacts – that’s why the most fundamental change we need to make as a society is to be more energy efficient.
“Any material or system will require materials that will have some form of carbon emissions but wind and solar have robustly been shown to have very low embodied carbon when compared to coal, oil and gas.”
He sent data to prove it – from reliable US sources that he trusts.
As always, perfect is the enemy of the good. The ideal would be to have no carbon emissions but that’s not going to happen, he says. “The transition is about how much better we can be compared to our habitual methods and fuels.”
Yes, there are challenges with recycling. We know this. In wind turbines there are hybrid materials that pose challenges, Oldfield said.
“These are more difficult to recycle and certainly there’s work that needs to be done but if measuring from a greenhouse gas emissions and life cycle basis they’re still much better than conventional fossil fuels.
The misunderstanding (we’re being kind) is part of a backlash that, we hate to say, threatens the progress we celebrated of the last few years.
Oldfield suspects it might stem from a cost of living backlash. Certainly, it doesn’t come from a position of caring for People and Planet. Nor science nor even business logic.
Masterclass on precincts was both exhilarating and challenging
His comments were right on cue with what we heard the day before at our Wednesday masterclass #4 on precincts that was both exhilarating and challenging.
CleanPeak Energy’s Philip Graham rounded off an excellent session with a deeply generous presentation on the nuts and bolts of his company’s investments in the energy systems of Barangaroo, Central Park in Sydney and Tonsley Innovation District in Adelaide.
Generous because of the detail and the incisive views he shared. But provocative when he noted a new report showed Australia is falling way short of meeting its renewable energy target and that getting big renewable energy projects is getting harder.
The pressure on buildings has just intensified
Our conclusion is that the pressure on the building sector has now intensified.
If renewable energy producers are going to struggle to meet our clean energy needs, if the grid is going to fall apart because we put a kilowatt or two too much clean energy into it, if the greenies are going to fight for no harm at all to our beautiful natural environment (and we sympathise we really, really, do) then brace yourselves, good folk of the built environment – your work is only just beginning.
If as Jeff Robinson from Aurecon pointed out to us only a few months ago, we retrofitted our commercial buildings to Passive House standard – from the inside, floor by floor – and made them as energy efficient as a residential Passive House building then imagine how much less demand we will put on the grid!