Climate expert wows Sydneysiders

BY ALEX MCDONALD

The head of the London Climate Change Agency had plenty of advice for those wanting to make Sydney an environmentally sustainable city. Speaking before a packed house at the MLC Centre during his recent Australian visit, the British environment expert Allan Jones spoke about the inefficiency of traditional power providers, pointing to the $1 billion worth of energy that’s wasted each year at British coal and nuclear power stations.

Like London, most of Sydney’s carbon emissions are the result of power generation.

Almost 80 per cent of the city’s greenhouse emissions are from electricity supplied to homes and businesses, with cars and other modes of transport accounting for less than 10 per cent of emissions.

Jones showed slides of various London buildings, including several fire stations, which have been fitted with photovoltaic solar panels. ‘One of the first things I hope to see in Sydney is the Town Hall being retro-fitted,’ Jones said.

Jones predicted that by 2016, most new buildings in London would be carbon neutral.

‘You have developers crying into their beer ‘ but [energy efficiency] accounts for no more than 1 per cent of the total development cost,’ he said.

Jones also claimed it was disingenuous of energy companies to blame consumers for excessive power use. He said that leaving TVs and washing machines in standby mode, for instance, had little impact, as this energy had already been used in the power grid.

Jones was speaking as part of Green Transformers, a precursor to the City of Sydney’s Sustainable Sydney 2030, a strategy that aims to reduce Sydney’s carbon emissions by 70 per cent using technologies similar to those developed in Britain by Jones and his team.

Jones first introduced alternative electricity generating technology in the British city of Woking. As chief engineer, he set about replacing the town’s electricity and heating systems with cogeneration, a more efficient system of combining heat and power generation ‘ at a fraction of the cost.

‘”At Woking, we installed a gas-fired system ‘ far less polluting than coal ‘ which generates electricity locally,’ he said. ‘Heat from the generation process is captured and piped underground to supply heating and hot water.’

Similar power generating methods are also used in Denmark, the Netherlands and Korea.

Lord Mayor Clover Moore, who introduced Jones, told the MLC audience: “When we consulted with residents and businesses about what they want in 2030, 97 per cent of people told us they want global warming addressed by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.’

Under the Sustainable Sydney plan, the City of Sydney aims to wean itself off polluting coal-fired power by decentralising electricity generation and powering entire blocks with gas-fired green transformers. The waste heat associated with the generation of electricity would then be used to heat water and heat and cool buildings, further reducing the city’s energy bill.

Although the Iemma government has met a great deal of resistance in its plan to privatise the state’s electricity system, said that ‘as we have learnt in Britain, privatisation of the energy supply is not necessarily an obstacle but can also be an opportunity to introduce less damaging forms of power generation and supply’.

Jones said for both businesses and governments wanting to adapt, the barriers ‘are not technical but regulatory and vested interests’.