Too much cooling is putting the heat in our bills.

AS the summer begins to sizzle and you reach for your air conditioner’s remote, there’s something you need to know.

A big chunk of rising energy prices is caused by surging demand on the hottest few days of the year.

In its report on electricity regulation, the Productivity Commission states that just 40 hours of peak use during the year account for a quarter of our bills.

“We invest in the capacity of the network – the poles and wires – so we’re able to turn on the air conditioning when it’s incredibly hot,” says Dr Lynne Chester, from University of Sydney. “But it’s used for a very small proportion of time.”

In the last few years, our overall demand for electricity has fallen, but the peak level continues to rise.

The reason? Air conditioning has gone through the roof. By 2020, it is forecast to double from 2000 levels.

The Productivity Commission (PDF) attributes the change to rising incomes, cheaper air conditioners, bigger new homes and the trend to install more than one unit, “particularly by higher income households”.

It’s an equity concern too: because everyone pays higher network costs, people who don’t use air conditioners at peak times are subsidising those who do.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

But Dr Chester says there’s a broader problem. “As our lifestyles change, we’ve taken things like water and electricity for granted. It’s there whenever we turn on the tap and the switch.”

If we’re to avoid excess investment in the network – and the inevitable higher prices – we need to reduce peak demand first. And that means a shift away from a “predict and provide” approach to electricity, to something more complex.

Householders can expect a more active role in the way we manage energy production.

Smart meters allow electricity retailers to charge more when demand is high. “Time-of-use pricing means that when demand goes up, the price will go up,” Dr Chester says. “The most expensive time will be late in the afternoon, when the kids are home, the TV is on and you’re preparing dinner – that’s when the daily peak is occurring.”

That’s the stick approach, but there’ll be carrots too. Some retailers will alert you in advance of a critical peak, and offer discounts or incentives for switching off, if you can.

In South Australia, distributor SA Power Networks has been trialling “direct load control”, which takes the day-to-day decision out of customers’ hands. If residents agree – in exchange for $100 – they install a widget on their air conditioner and, at critical times, remotely switch off the compressor (but not the fan) for about ten minutes every half hour.

The results are significant: among participants, they’ve been able to reduce peak demand by more than one-third without people noticing any loss of comfort. To make a dent in the overall spike, however, they’d need residents to sign on in large numbers.

Dr Chester says the problem will keep growing, unless our consumption habits change. For that, we need different norms and different buildings.

“We’re treating the symptom and not the cause,” she says. “We don’t build houses with eaves and verandas, or design them for natural breezes. We’re turning on air conditioning instead.

“We’ve got to improve the efficiency of existing stock. We could start by retrofitting public housing; what better way to help low-income households improve energy efficiency and reduce energy bills?”

Read this article at The Age online

The carbon revolution is being advertised, but it’s not really happening.

APPLE has got the Earth covered. It’s even got a bright green slogan: “Bigger Picture. Better Products. Smaller Impact”.

But is that really so? The iPhone5, tipped to be the highest selling gadget of all time, has a greenhouse gas impact two-thirds higher than the old iPhone4.

In fact, the total carbon footprint of Apple’s products is rising very fast, says academic and author Guy Pearse, from University of Queensland. “It’s the world’s biggest company, it’s selling itself as green and its emissions have doubled in two years.”

He suggests Apple replace its slogan with “something closer to the truth, like ‘More Products. Bigger Impact’.”

This example is just one of scores uncovered by Dr Pearse in his new book Greenwash: Big Brands and Climate Scams.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Until now, the greenwash debate has spotlighted sins in the marketing of individual products. Dr Pearse took a different tack: he chose to investigate the companies’ total carbon footprint.

For four years, he subjected himself to mind-bending quantities of big business advertising material. He checked the fine print, trawled through hundreds of annual and sustainability reports and drew on documents lodged with the Carbon Disclosure Project. He analysed companies operating in all categories of consumer spending, from banks and beer, to sports and sweet treats.

His verdict is unequivocal. “When you look at the overall carbon footprint, almost none of these companies can claim their emissions will be falling anytime soon. It was a very depressing picture. The climate-friendly revolution being advertised is not really happening.”

Even worse, he says, most big businesses are using an identical greenwashing template to create the opposite impression.

Typically, a company will exclude the impact of the products they actually sell and, instead, only count the environmental impact of corporate headquarters. It’ll install low-energy lighting and solar panels, switch off for Earth Hour, and champion a glossy report.

“By narrowly defining your carbon footprint, you can give the impression the emissions of the brand are shrinking, when they’re growing,” he explains.

“The supply chains of these companies almost all lead back to the developing world, to countries that aren’t constrained by any carbon prices or emission caps. There’s a trail of emissions that’s being offloaded by the big brands.”

Another common tactic is to highlight a clean green product line, to the exclusion of the messy rest.

Take cars, for example. While some companies hype their hybrid or electric vehicles (the Holden Volt has just been released in Australia), they sell them in minuscule numbers, compared to gas-guzzlers.

“The growth that’s occurring in the market is such that the total emissions are going up dramatically,” he says. “Minor improvements in overall fleet efficiency will never lead to overall reductions in emissions from a growing industry.”

Or take Origin Energy, which got good coverage for its Green for Footy campaign with the Australian Football League. It’s the biggest retailer of GreenPower, but nearly half of its electricity generating capacity in Australia is coal-fired.

And, as Dr Pearse notes, it is part of a coal seam gas joint venture in Queensland’s Darling Downs, with a plan to export liquefied natural gas. He says Origin’s share of that scheme equates to “roughly eleven times the carbon footprint of the products [it] currently sells”, and dwarfs the emissions saved by all the renewable energy it has ever sold.

Dr Pearse says householders must understand that “we can’t shop the planet green”. But he argues that individual action – reducing consumption – isn’t sufficient either.

“Ultimately this book is all about why the politics matters and why we need to be angry and active. Real step-changes are the only things that will lead to the emissions reductions the scientists say are essential.

“They’re not going to happen while we’re kidding ourselves with greenwash. The incremental change being embraced by big business just isn’t going to cut it. It’s a reality check that consumers, governments and environmental groups need to have.”

Read this article at The Age online

Will our poles and pipes lead down the road, not out of town?

FOR generations, our essential services have come from afar. In cities, especially, our electricity, gas and water arrive from elsewhere and our waste goes away.

But it won’t necessarily stay that way.

Last month, at the Thriving Neighbourhoods conference held at the Melbourne exhibition centre, post-graduate students and industry types collaborated in a workshop on “decentralised district infrastructure”.

This was the scenario: what if E-Gate – the wedge of land between Docklands and North Melbourne station – was developed as a sustainable precinct? How could it generate electricity, treat wastewater, retain stormwater and deal with rubbish?

Peter Steele, from Moreland Energy Foundation, led the discussion on infrastructure. He says a big shift has already begun.

“At its most basic level, solar panels and water tanks are forms of decentralised infrastructure, and installations are taking off,” he says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

For a large-scale example, Mr Steele points to Hammarby Sjöstad, in Stockholm, Sweden. Its re-development began the late 1990s, when the inner-city land was converted from an industrial shantytown.

“They looked at the infrastructure as a sort of ecology, assessing the inputs and outputs and how they could be reused locally,” he says.

All the heating and cooling for the precinct, which is home to 26,000 people, comes from solar panels and heat extracted from waste treatment. Biogas captured from sewage is used to power local buses, and treated “sludge” is used as a fertiliser.

Mr Steele says we’re lagging behind Europe, but there’s potential to cut carbon emissions quickly and deeply by matching the needs of different buildings: say, heating a pool and powering nearby office blocks.

One way to do that is gas-fired cogeneration or trigeneration – producing heating, cooling and power together. “It makes sense for buildings to share infrastructure that provides their needs more efficiently and with a far lower carbon footprint,” he says.

“A lot of people question whether cogeneration is locking us into another fossil fuel. But it also has the potential to be used with renewables, such as biomass and biofuels.”

Tosh Szatow, from power services business Energy for the People, says much of our established infrastructure is getting old. “It’s time to overhaul it, but gee that’s going to be really expensive. Is there a better way?”

Mr Szatow was a co-author of CSIRO’s Intelligent Grid report, which assessed the prospects for distributed energy in Australia. He says the change will come first to new suburbs and infill developments, such as E-Gate.

“Cost is a big driver for doing it differently. And carbon emissions are part of that cost. Our system is premised on coal and gas being cheap, and it being okay to burn them. Now those premises are questioned we have to find alternatives,” he says.

He’s tipping a future where our low-density suburbs are off the electricity grid (courtesy of solar power and battery storage) and our high-density zones plug into large-scale renewables.

What would the neighbourhood look like? “It could be solar panels on the roofs, battery banks on the streets, local food gardens, and water catchments or waste management wetlands down the road,” he says.

But it won’t just happen – Mr Szatow says householders must demand change from governments and utilities, join community energy groups and install renewables at home. “We don’t have to sit around and wait for change; we can be active in bringing it about.”

Read this article at The Age online

There’s more to recycling than steel cans and glass bottles.

AUTHOR and science journalist Tanya Ha often asks this question:  What do you do in you own home to help the environment?

“Recycling is the first thing people say,” she says. “We’ve been doing it and we’re proud of it. To some degree, it’s second nature.”

National Recycling Week starts tomorrow, coordinated by Planet Ark. There’ll be challenges, swaps and workshops in schools and council areas around the country, and “file flings” in offices to encourage paper recycling.

A recent study released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that 98 percent of households recycle or reuse items around home.

That’s something to celebrate, Ms Ha says, but not something to be satisfied with. (Take aluminium cans: we recycle two out of every three; the Germans, 96 out of 100.)

“We’ve gone into autopilot on day-to-day recycling. We could improve, especially away from home, but generally we do it pretty well. But the ground is shifting under us. There’s a lot more we can do,” she says.

To coincide with Recycling Week, Ms Ha and Planet Ark have released a report called Second Nature, which tracks the past and present and speculates on the future of recycling in Australia.

“The waste we produce says so much about our society: what things we buy, what things we value and what we don’t,” she says.

Normal practices are always changing. In the nineteenth century, rag and bone collectors sold household rags to paper mills, and kitchen bones to makers of buttons, soap, glue and gelatine. Until the 1960s, glass drink bottles were all refillable.

Ms Ha says our reasons for recycling have also changed, from concern about sanitation in the eighteenth century, and the need for thrift during the war eras, to worries about landfill capacity in the ’60s and ’70s, when consumption and single-use packaging boomed.

“Now the pressing need is climate change,” she explains, “and the other motivation will be resource security.”

They’re big concerns. Ms Ha says we need a shift in mindset, away from a linear, “cradle-to-grave” approach, and into cyclical, “cradle-to-cradle” thinking.

Organic waste is the perfect illustration. In 2006-07, material such as food scraps, paper, cardboard, wood and garden clippings comprised nearly two-thirds of everything that went into landfill (PDF).

“In landfill conditions, it produces methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. But biodegradable waste is such a useful resource; we need to capture it and put it back into the soil,” she says.

The other challenge is e-waste, such as computers, televisions and batteries. Around Australia, there are 22 million disused mobile phones and accessories languishing in the dark.

Inside are precious resources: 1 tonne of obsolete mobile phones (not including their batteries) can yield 300 grams of gold, over 3 kilograms of silver, about 140 kilograms of copper, among other things.

Until the end of the year, MobileMuster, the industry-funded recycling program, is promoting a “memory muster”. Post or drop-off your old mobile and they’ll send you prints of your six favourite, forgotten photos.

Remember, however, that avoiding consumption is better than recycling the results. Do you really need that new phone, TV or gadget?

With the race on to reduce carbon emissions, Ms Ha says, just worrying about recycling “is like a swimmer just focussing on the tumble turns, not on the laps”.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Read this article at The Age online