A zero carbon future means ditching gas for solar power

TOGETHER, Australia’s houses could produce more electricity than they use, according to think-tank Beyond Zero Emissions. And the transition need not take long.

The analysis, released last month in its Zero Carbon Australia Buildings Plan, shows that comprehensively retrofitting our buildings with insulation, double-glazing and efficient lighting and appliances could more than halve their energy use.

On our rooftops, we have space to accommodate enough solar panels so that our homes would collectively produce more energy than they consume, averaged over a year.

The report’s lead author, Trent Hawkins, says energy efficiency has a crucial role in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

“About one quarter of Australia’s emissions come from our buildings. We could carve that out really rapidly.

“The climate science says emissions need to peak internationally by 2016. Building efficiency is something we can roll out now that will give us big cuts,” he says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

The plan has been several years in the making. One of its key planks is to stopping using gas altogether.

“You can’t have zero emissions if you’re producing carbon dioxide, so that rules out fossil gas,” Mr Hawkins says. “The building industry should be looking at shifting to 100 per cent electricity, and then advancing the broader debate about renewable energy and decarbonising the grid.”

Mr Hawkins explains that while air conditioning is often demonised, Victorians actually consume eighty times more energy warming our homes than we do cooling them. The average across the whole country is ten to one.

“In Victoria we use a large amount of fossil gas. We’ve become dependent on it to be comfortable, and ignored the fact that our building envelopes are generally very poor,” he says.

Ducted gas heaters are common, but they’re particularly wasteful; they heat the whole house, not just a single room. Often, because of tears and rips in the tubes, they’re blowing hot air under the floor as well as inside.

The buildings plan advocates replacing all gas heating with efficient reverse cycle air conditioners. Mr Hawkins acknowledges that on certain summer days, air conditioners present a problem – we all turn them on at once, and electricity demand spikes – but he says we can solve that with smart management and incentives for homeowners.

The plan also proposes replacing all gas hot water systems with heat pump systems, which use similar technology to air conditioners. In our kitchens, gas burners can be replaced with induction cooktops, which are more efficient and responsive than traditional electric stoves.

These retrofits have a price tag, but it’s an investment, not simply a cost. Mr Hawkins says the worst-case scenario – “the most you’d have to spend” – is covered in the case study of an old, detached Melbourne house, with little insulation. The full overhaul, including double-glazing and replacing all major appliances, would cost about $36,000, plus another $10,000 for solar panels (unsubsidised).

Nevertheless, over thirty years, residents will come out well ahead (by up to $6000). “We would be sinking money into energy bills anyway, with no long term benefit,” he says. “We can spend that money to upgrade our buildings and we’ll be better off financially.

“One of the main benefits is that it gives households energy freedom. Today we’re all paying heaps of money on bills. Anyone can follow this plan, and it will give them permanent insurance against rising energy prices.”

Read this article at The Age online

It’s time to question what’s in the kitchen

THIS year, for the second summer, dozens of residents in South London have planted an unlikely crop in their gardens, backyards and allotments. They’re growing hops to supply the Brixton Beer Company.

The results of last harvest, a pale ale called Prima Donna, were particularly popular: the beer was served in three different pubs, and downed in a single night.

The project was coordinated by an organisation called City Farmers. Its purpose wasn’t mass production, but rather, to get fingernails dirty and loosen lips on the matter of urban agriculture and the sources of our sustenance.

That’s exactly kind of conversation Nick Rose and his collaborators replicated around Australia during Fair Food Week, which finished recently.

There were nearly 100 events around the country, from forums and films to farm tours and suburban food swaps. In Wodonga there was a cheesemaking workshop; in Beechworth, an open day for the neighbourhood kitchen; and in West Brunswick, a tour of the community garden and food forest.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

“The idea of Fair Food Week is to shine a spotlight on the inequities and unsustainability of the way the food system is developing – this push towards very few big farms producing a small range of commodities, and the retail sector being dominated by a couple of companies,” Mr Rose says.

“We’re concerned about the long term sustainability and resilience of that system – I’m talking about problems like the obesity pandemic, the degradation of our soils and the cost-price squeeze on farmers, as well as the loss of our food processing capabilities and our vanishing high streets and greengrocers.”

The week was coordinated by the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. The organisation also released the “People’s Food Plan”, a document prepared with input from hundreds of people in dozens of meetings around the country.

“Our vision is for something much more diverse, much more decentralised: a whole ecology of food production, processing, distribution and retailing which is about connecting people with the source of their food,” he says.

Householders can help those alternatives grow. “For fresh produce, particularly in a city like Melbourne, there are so many sources – markets, farmers markets, or vegetable box schemes, such as CERES’ Fair Food, which operates with local growers.”

Mr Rose was also a contributing author on a recent report on urban food security prepared for the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility.

The academics noted recent floods had revealed the fragility of food supply lines into cities and concluded that the viability and productivity of our current farming system is “likely to be seriously compromised” by climate change.

They concluded that while cities wouldn’t become self-sufficient, urban food growing could contribute nutritionally, environmentally and socially. Because local food systems reduce dependence on oil and cut wastage, and also, bring people together, they can help cities both moderate and adapt to climate change.

“We found that Melbourne is a hotbed of urban food in Australia,” Mr Rose says. “There are outstanding examples of people growing large quantities of food in their own gardens, as well as different models of community gardening and productive streetscapes.

“Through Fair Food Week we’re promoting a broader public discussion about the challenges of our food system, but we’re also celebrating the achievements of the fair food pioneers in Australia who are working for something fairer and better.”

One million Australian households now produce solar electricity

IN March 2012, Sian Dart had solar panels installed on her roof in Footscray. But it was late May before the system was finally connected to the grid. In the meantime, she spent hours chasing paperwork between the installer, the electricity distributor and the retailer.

It took another four months before the last mix-up was resolved. “It was very frustrating, and I’m not sure how long it would’ve taken if we hadn’t followed up so doggedly,” she says.

Earlier this year, the 1 millionth Australian household – about one in nine across the country – installed solar photovoltaic panels. There are half a million with solar hot water services too.

The process doesn’t always go as expected, for reasons both practical and political: rebates and feed-in tariffs have been in flux in every state. But now there are so many systems on roofs, solar homeowners are gaining a stronger public voice.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In Victoria, the electorate with the most solar households is Lalor, held by former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, with just over 10,000 homes out of 80,000. Other solar strongholds include regional seats McEwen, Indi and McMillan. Altogether, Victorian homeowners have invested about $1.3 billion in solar electricity.

Those statistics have been gathered by advocacy group 100% Renewable Energy, which has prepared “solar scorecards” rating each member of parliament before the federal election. The organisation has also started Solar Citizens, a community project to transform the growing people-power into pressure for solar-friendly policies.

“As individual consumers, we’re isolated and relatively powerless compared to big energy companies who have enormous influence over governments,” says Geoff Evans, from Solar Citizens.

“We want to unite solar households, and people who like solar, to call on decision-makers to grow this technology that enables people to save money and produce clean energy.”

Dr Evans argues solar electricity is unfairly blamed for increasing power prices, and that solar owners must not be lumped with high fixed connection fees.

The Productivity Commission’s recent report on the electricity network, released in late June, supports his claim about price rises. It attributed most of the jump in bills in recent years to “spiralling network costs”, caused in part by poor regulation of the industry.

Regulators and utilities here have so far resisted the shift to distributed power generation, but in New Zealand there are signs of change. Vector, the electricity distributor for Auckland and surrounds, has begun a pilot programme offering a 3-kilowatt solar panel system together with battery storage. It costs $2000 up front, with a monthly fee of $70 for 12 years.

For an average household, that equates to about the same or less cost than normal bills. Participants remain connected to the grid, but the battery storage will help reduce the evening peak demand on the network.

In Footscray, with her panels in place, Ms Dart’s electricity bills have fallen by more than two-thirds. Unexpectedly, generating her own power has also made her more “militant” about avoiding unnecessary waste.

“Since we got the glitches sorted, it’s been drama-free – they’re sitting there doing their job,” she says. “If it’s sunny during the day, I feel good knowing we’re making a few dollars.”

To help avoid the trouble she had, you can prepare yourself with the Clean Energy Council’s guide to buying household solar panels, which includes a step-by-step installation checklist.

Read this article at The Age online

Budding wattles and bellowing koalas reveal the change in the weather

BY our upside-down European calendar, spring starts in September. But look carefully at your backyard or street, and you’ll see changes before then.

In Victoria, keep your eyes open for the flowering of silver wattles. The bright yellow flowers, which usually bloom in August, mark the coming of Guling, or Orchid season.

“We’re nearly there,” says John Patten, from Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at the Melbourne Museum. “We’ve already come through the highest rainfall, but we’re in the lowest temperatures.”

Mr Patten is showing me a display in the museum’s forest enclosure, which describes seven different seasons understood by the Kulin people – the five Aboriginal nations in the area we know as Melbourne and central Victoria.

The Kulin calendar, like all Aboriginal seasonal knowledge, is defined by the interactions of plants, animals and weather, as well as the length of the days and the movement of the stars.

The cold, wet time of year – Waring or Wombat season – lasts from April until July. Days are short and nights long, and wombats emerge to bask and graze when it’s sunny.

Next, around August, Orchid season lasts only a month. Wattles bloom, orchids flower, and at night, male koalas bellow and the caterpillars of the common brown butterfly feed on grass. Then, in September and October, Poorneet or Tadpole season arrives, in which days and nights are of equal length and the pied currawongs call loudly and often.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Mr Patten is a Yorta Yorta (northeast Victoria) and Bundjalung (northern New South Wales) man. He says it’s important to recognise that the traditional seasons vary greatly between places.

“For example, non-Indigenous audiences understand that we have wet and dry seasons in the Top End, but some groups up there identify with a calendar of six or even 12 different seasons.”

The Kulin calendar at the museum is a modern interpretation, pieced together by Koori people and academics. “The records for the seasons in Victoria are incomplete. We have records that suggest there were five, six or seven seasons. It was in flux, because people were reacting to what was happening around them,” he says.

As well as yearly cycles, the Kulin people observed a regular fire season, which occurred every seven years on average, and a flood season, every 28 years.

Also in the museum’s forest enclosure, just a few metres from the exhibit on the Kulin seasons, stands the chimney of a homestead burned down in the Black Saturday bushfires. Traditional knowledge helps us understand and stay prepared for natural disasters, Mr Patten says, noting that many of our cities and towns have been built on flood plains or in bushfire zones. “A lot of people don’t appreciate the complexity in the way this continent works.”

The science of the timing of natural cycles is called phenology. As temperatures rise and weather patterns shift due to climate change, these cycles are moving.

In 2010, a study showed that a one-degree increase in Melbourne’s temperature had led to the common brown butterfly emerging from its cocoon ten days earlier than it did mid last-century. That’s significant because mismatches with other species could have cascading effects in the ecosystem.

Citizens can help scientists understand what’s happening by taking part in ClimateWatch, as website where participants monitor and record the behaviour of common species of birds, plants and insects.

Read this article at The Age online

A new scheme aims to get our food out of the bin

NEAR the pig pen at Collingwood Children’s Farm, there’s a compost pile 20 metres long and over a metre tall. At one end, the mound is cluttered with cabbage leaves and straw. By the time it reaches the other, it has transformed into rich, dark humus: the sign of prosperity for food growers.

“It’s all just billions of microbes eating and breeding,” explains Kat Lavers, chief composter with Cultivating Community, as steam rises from pile. “A good hot compost like this could be ready in a month.”

The compost windrow, together with two giant worm farms in the shade of nearby peppercorn trees, is a community compost hub. It’s the first of four to be built in the City of Yarra, as part of a new project called Food Know How.

The neighbourhood composting hubs are just one element of the scheme, which was launched in June. Together with Yarra council, Cultivating Community is seeking 500 local residents, 32 cafes and 3 offices to participate.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Right now, food waste comprises more than half the average household rubbish bin in the municipality. That means we’re all squandering good soil, food and money, from the residents through to the authorities. We’re paying to offload a useful resource to landfill, only for it to rot into methane – a potent greenhouse gas.

“We’re dooming all those nutrients and embodied water and energy to no man’s land, where we can’t recover them,” says Pete Huff, from Cultivating Community. “By learning some simple skills in our households and businesses we can cut the Yarra waste stream in half. It makes good financial and environmental sense and it makes good sense as citizens as well.”

He says the first skill is to avoid food wastage in the first place. The program’s website carries links to recipe ideas for leftovers and odds and ends.

If your salad greens often go slimy or your packets pass their use-by date, Mr Huff recommends making a meal plan and a shopping list to match it – after you check the pantry to see what’s already there. “They’re all simple things, but it’s about smart shopping, clever cooking and storing food correctly,” he says.

When it comes to unavoidable waste – the not-so-edible food scraps such as lemon peels, banana skins or eggshells – the answer is compost. Participants in the program will be subsidised to purchase a worm farm or composting system to suit their needs, and then helped to do it right with workshops and advice.

“Well-managed compost and worm systems don’t smell and they take up little room and time,” Mr Huff says. “We want these systems in people’s backyards, on balconies, or laneways. And if that’s not an option we’ll put them in their neighbourhood so they’re part of the fabric of the community.”

At the Collingwood Children’s Farm, volunteers will collect food scraps from cafes in the area, and pedal them to the compost hub on specially designed Trisled cargo trikes, which can lug up to 100 kilos at a time.

As well as the food scraps, Ms Lavers adds animal bedding and cardboard to the mix to provide a source of carbon. It’s a serious operation: to turn the pile, she pilots a bobcat.

“We see compost as a real asset, particularly in an urban environment where fertility can be an issue,” says Mr Huff.

Read this article at The Age online

King tides give residents a view into the future of our coasts

TWICE a year, the tides reach their peak. And when they do, the sea washes over piers and paths, and inundates parks. It’s a prelude to a coastline with higher seas all year round – one in which seaside real estate will be at increasing risk.

“King tides are a great proxy,” says Caitlin Calder-Potts, from Green Cross Australia. “They’re a way of bridging the gap between an abstract projection for sea level rise, and actually seeing what the impacts are in your local area. By observing them, we can understand how our coasts might change.”

To that end, she’s coordinating a project called Witness King Tides, in which citizens photograph while the waters rise. You can register online, then upload your snaps of the seaside.

The next big tide during daylight hours will sweep the Victorian coastline from May 26 to 30. It peaks in Portland at lunchtime on the 26^th, for example, or Port Welshpool at dusk on the 30^th. (Find the exact tide times on the Bureau of Meteorology website.)

The project started in New South Wales in 2009, and since then, it’s been held in Queensland and southern Tasmania. So far, wave watchers have uploaded 4000 images. Many show coastlines coping well, but elsewhere, infrastructure is already at risk.

“We’ve had feedback from lots of surf life saving clubs saying they’re vulnerable, and community spaces like parks and foreshores too. Erosion and estuarine flooding are fairly common during king tides,” Ms Calder-Potts says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

The project’s popularity isn’t surprising: more than 8 out of ten Australians live near the coast, and there are over 700,000 homes within 3 kilometres of the sea.

According to the Climate Commission, sea levels are likely to rise by between half a metre and one metre by 2100. Even at the lower end, that could increase the frequency of flooding by several hundred times.

But last year, the Victorian government last year scrapped a requirement to plan for 80 centimetres sea level rise by the end of the century (except for new “greenfields” developments).

Professor Bruce Thom, former chair of the federal Coasts and Climate Change Council, says the planning system should adopt higher-end thresholds for developments that are expected to last.

He was part of a 2009 government study into the climate change risks to Australia’s coast. It found that hundreds of thousands of buildings would be at risk of flooding and damage under a high sea level rise scenario that coincides with a storm surge.

Prof Thom says king tides – which aren’t connected with human-caused global warming – help us understand sea level rise because they make local impacts clear.

(“King tide” isn’t a scientific term. It refers to the biggest of the regular “spring tides”, which occur when the Moon is full or new, and aligned with the Earth and the Sun.)

Local knowledge is useful, because sea level is more complex than you might think. Firstly, the ocean isn’t flat – it’s constantly in flux, in the same way as the atmosphere moves according to high and low pressure systems. Secondly, tidal levels depend on the shape of the shoreline.

“What happens at a particular place can vary enormously because of the nature of the bays, inlets, lakes and lagoons,” Prof Thom says.

Climate change causes sea level rise in two main ways: by increasing ocean temperatures (water expands as it warms) and by melting glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets.

“In certain parts of Australia we’ve had a very small amount of sea level rise going on for some time,” he says. “The fear scientists have is that the rate of rise will increase – that it isn’t linear and could be exponential. The big concern is disturbance to the Greenland ice sheet or the West Antarctic ice sheet.”

Read this article at The Age online

In 2020, could citizens hold the power?

MAY 12, 2020: Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by nearly a third in the last decade, according to a report by the Department of Energy Transition, Efficiency and Enoughness.

The report showed a dramatic shift to localised, renewable energy production, made possible by radical improvements in efficiency. One in every three Australian households supplies its own electricity – whether individually, in clusters or small communities.

The report highlighted three key drivers for change: the affordability and reliability of solar photovoltaic panels and ongoing improvements in batteries; the community campaign to switch from fossil fuels; and the Great Firestorm Summer of 2016. It found that those tragic bushfires were a catalyst for the technology to leap from the fringes into the mainstream.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

What’s all this? It’s a composite of future scenarios imagined by Alan Pears, adjunct professor at RMIT University, and energy consultant Tosh Szatow – both of whom are advocates for localised, not centralised, electricity generation.

While such a rapid switch away from the grid seems hard to imagine, Mr Pears argues that the indicators of change are already with us.

“There are so many emerging options for distributed energy, smart backup generators and battery storage, together with efficiency to dramatically reduce our needs, that the old electricity industry can’t win,” he says. “The centralised technology solution they’re offering will be out-competed by these diverse solutions.”

Appliance manufacturers are already prototyping “smart energy packages” for households: a combination of home-scale renewable energy, together with storage, efficient appliances and monitoring systems.

Mr Pears says big-box appliance retailers will begin selling those packages on a pay-as-you-go, no upfront cost basis.

How will the existing electricity networks and regulators respond? One possibility is that they’ll attempt to maintain profitability by switching to capacity charges – where you pay for the amount of network capacity you need at your peak usage – or by increasing fixed fees.

“Even now my fixed electricity charge is significantly more than half of my bill,” Mr Pears says. “I’m grouchy about that. Fixed charges are regressive – they fall disproportionately on low-income and low-energy users.”

He believes that either way, there’ll come a time when going off-grid becomes the most attractive option. “People who live simply and have low consumption will be the first to move off-grid in the city,” he says.

Mr Szatow, from Energy for the People, agrees that the trend is toward more local generation and storage of power, and more self-reliant homes and communities.

“It was only in about 2000 that the world started taking solar photovoltaic panels seriously. By 2012 in Australia, the price had come down to the point where it was cheaper to produce your energy than buy it from the grid,” he says.

Some households will go it alone, while others – with the help of new energy services businesses – will combine to buy extra storage and backup generators.

“Changes always begins in a niche,” Mr Szatow says. “The niche for small-scale energy generation is where the centralised grid is weakest – for example, in new suburb developments where the network hasn’t been built, or in remote areas where reliability is poor or the servicing costs are high.”

He argues there are several possible catalysts (and timelines) for the niche to become mainstream, including natural disasters, cheap battery technology developed in response to high oil prices, and new energy service models.

Read this article at The Age online

Green roofs and streetscapes make a cool change for the city

FROM his own patch of turf in Coburg, Emilio Fuscaldo can see south all the way to the skyscrapers. The grass is on his roof.

It’s one of only a few residential green roofs in Melbourne.

Mr Fuscaldo is the founder of Nest Architects; his motives were both private and public. “It’s incumbent on architects to practice what we preach. I wanted to show that you can devote a large percentage of your budget to sustainability,” he says. “You can compromise on other things, such as kitchens, cupboards and tiles, and still achieve a beautiful result.”

Before the soil was installed, Mr Fuscaldo and his partner lived in their home for a summer and most of winter. The difference was immediately clear: with the slab of earth overhead, their heating bill halved. In the summer, the temperature is now always tolerable without air conditioning.

“You cool and heat when you hit the extremes and we’re not hitting the extremes,” he says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Mr Fuscaldo estimates that the green roof added between $20,000 and $30,000 to the cost of the home (the biggest expense is waterproofing). “This wasn’t an exercise in affordability. It’s about assigning your budget the right way,” he says.

The couple bought the back of someone else’s block, and designed an elegant, two-bedroom house to fit the space. But although the backyard has gone, the living roof means the bugs and birds sill have a place to be.

The rainwater in their tank gets filtered through the vegetation and the roof also reduces stormwater runoff during heavy rain. Most of their plants are ornamental, but this autumn, their rooftop plot delivered a zucchini as large as their infant son.

There’s another, less tangible, benefit too. “It feels amazing to be in the house and know that between you and the world is this amount of land,” Mr Fuscaldo says. “It’s like being in a cave. It really adds to your experience of dwelling.”

If you’d like to follow suit, there’s a heavy catch. Existing roofs aren’t strong enough to bear the load without expensive retrofitting.

With that snag in mind, Melbourne resident Shelley Meagher founded ‘Do It On The Roof’, a campaign to put green roofs on the places that can already cope best: commercial buildings.

Together with several other volunteers, Dr Meagher is calling for a public green roof in Melbourne’s CBD.

The City of Melbourne’s open space plan, released last year, showed that in the heart of the city – around Elizabeth and Bourke Streets – there’s no public open space within a walkable distance.

“Thermal imaging studies of Melbourne show that the hottest part of the city is around Hardware Lane,” Dr Meagher says. “Having buildings surrounded by concrete leads to increases in temperatures – that’s the urban heat island effect, and green roofs help reduce it.”

Climate scientist and adaptation expert Professor Roger Jones, from Victoria University, says it’s crucial we build cool, reflective or permeable streetscapes, as well as green roofs. They’ll not only help us cope with a hotter climate, but also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

“The difference between an urban forest and an adjoining suburb can be as much as 5 degrees,” he says. “We need cool spots for people on hot days, so we’re not all indoors by an air conditioner. We have to design places people want to be.”

Read this article at The Age online