TRANSITION RISK: If you get to the Transition Risk masterclass in Melbourne on 8 September you’ll get a bird’s eye view on one of the most stunning case studies doing the rounds of the energy cognoscenti over the past while.
It’s through Michael Snow, now with Turner & Townsend who while he was based at RMIT university created a transformation that continues impress.
Jarrod Leak who heads up the august outfit A2EP (Australian Alliance for Energy Productivity) called the work impressive in his article for The Fifth Estate.
Snow’s colleague Dale Gartshore from Monash University said he believed that lowering the temperature for HHW (heating hot water) to 60 degrees or lower is the key to lowering costs for heat pumps. This improves the equipment’s performance and removes it as an obstacle to full building electrification, Leak said.
The work at Building 80 was “textbook, best-case” heat pump retrofit under the management of Snow and his colleague Brad Costello, Leak said.
The building already had good energy efficiency performance but “the key enabler was the reduction or the HHW loop to 55 degrees.”
“From this, they were able to determine the heat pump sizing according to the maximum loads.
“The heat pump was 50 per cent of the nameplate capacity of the boilers they replaced so did not trigger an electrical system upgrade (but did need new cabling).
“The capex [capital expenditure] was about $2000 a kilowatt which is a fraction of what some consultants are estimating for such retrofits (and this was a high specification/high-quality build).
“The system also incorporated thermal storage to enable load-flexing and the four-pipe system design allows for the “waste cold” created by the heat pumps to be utilised elsewhere.”
The work wasn’t easy but was “absolutely worth doing, and it would change return on investment dramatically” Leak said.
Lowering HHW temperatures isn’t always easy, but if electrification and decarbonisation are your aim, it is absolutely worth doing as it can change the ROI dramatically.
