Smart power meters 'to hit poor'

HOUSEHOLDS that rely on daytime airconditioning, cooking and heating will be hit with higher power bills. This will occur as hi-tech "smart meters" are rolled out nationally.

Victorians are being slugged an average of $68 a year just for the remote digital meters to be installed -- even though barely 10 per cent of households have them.

Consumers are being billed upfront for the rollout to 2.5 million households, which is not due for completion before the end of 2013.

Other states and territories are trialling the devices, which send real-time readings to power companies every half-hour.

Utilities can then tailor their bills, to charge more for electricity used at peak times of demand during the day, and less at nights and weekends.

Victoria has stalled the new pricing system for at least nine months, after complaints from welfare and consumer groups that it would punish low-income families and pensioners.

The introduction of the smart meters comes in the wake of Australians' electricity bills rising 18.2 per cent last financial year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, with a typical bill going up by as much as 27 per cent to $2012 in Victoria and 12 per cent to $2278 for rural NSW residents.

Posted by Big Gav

Google Hits Geothermal Jackpot in West Virginia

Along with the great news that Google is investing a ton of money in anoffshore wind energy superhighway, other recent Google energy news is that a Google-funded project has discovered enough geothermal potential under a rather infamous coal state — West Virginia — to more than double the state’s electricity generation capacity.

Google gave the Southern Methodist University a $481,500 grant to look into this issue and the research findings were huge.

78% more geothermal energy is under the state than was previously expected.

The implications are rather clear: West Virginia could kick its dirty coal andmountaintop removal habit and start tapping into geothermal. This would be a benefit for the state economically and environmentally, meaning a better quality of life for its residents.

It could also help the country become more energy secure.

“The presence of a large, baseload, carbon neutral and sustainable energy resource in West Virginia could make an important contribution to enhancing the US energy security and for decreasing CO2 emissions,” the report concluded.

West Virginia currently has an electricity generating capacity of 16,350 MW (~97% of that coming from coal power), but the report concluded that if only 2% of the state’s geothermal energy were recovered, it could produce up to 18,890 MW of capacity from clean energy.

Zachary Shahan

The carbon management strategic priority

Taken from: Carbon Disclosure Protect

Carbon management is moving up the corporate agenda and many companies now understand the need to handle their emissions. But should carbon management be considered a strategic priority? That is the central question with which a recent report from the Carbon Disclosure Project and produced by Verdantix is concerned.

Carbon management is being propelled to the forefront of business across multiple sectors through a number of market drivers, including energy costs, the growing cost of carbon, brand reputation, energy supply risks, employee expectations, investor requests and competitive positioning. With firms expecting the impact of these drivers to grow over the next five to ten years, carbon management is increasingly being added to their long term priority checklists.

This report explores companies perception of carbon management and helps evidence the case that carbon management is a growing strategic issue.

New Software for Sustainable Product Design

This is a great tool to start providing low-carbon solutions from the design stages of the projects. So far, until now the use of these sort of packages has been in the air, with no real significance. Hopefully, this new partnership will give the construction industry a more sustainable way of doing things, without affecting the profitability of the business

Autodesk and Granta Design are teaming up to co-develop a new Web-based software that will allow businesses to assess the environmental impact of their materials choices during the product design stage. The partnership will leverage Autodesk’s digital prototyping with Granta’s materials information and eco-design technology.

The companies are working to integrate Granta’s eco-design methods into Autodesk software, helping designers to estimate the environmental impact of a product and make more sustainable design decisions, which will also help them meet regulatory compliance. The new tools will access and use data from Granta’s materials information database.

Because nearly 80 percent of a product’s environmental footprint is determined during the design phase, the combination of the companies’ technologies is expected to significantly help manufacturers optimize product sustainability, according to the companies.

“The ability to optimize material selection based on environmental impact, in addition to cost and performance, is crucial to today’s manufacturers,” said Robert “Buzz” Kross, senior vice president, Manufacturing Industry Group at Autodesk, in a statement. “We believe that companies of all sizes — not just large enterprises — deserve ready access to this information, and our partnership with Granta will help deliver that capability to Autodesk customers worldwide.”

Materials analysis and selection is becoming increasingly important for companies to control a product design’s environmental impact, particularly following the proposed revisions to the FTC Green Guide, which would require manufacturers that market their products as made with renewable materials to say how much of the product is made with those materials, what those materials are, how they are sourced and why they are considered renewable, say the companies.

In addition, the European Union’s recent Eco-design of Energy-Related Products Directive requires companies to use best practices in design for the environment to minimize the environmental impact of energy-using products and energy-related products.

Low carbon: Building a better future

I found this in the New Civil Engineer edition for the first week of October 2010. Being honest, this is the sort of wake up call required for long, to get the construction business into the Low-Carbon economy.

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How we cost buildings is set to change if carbon becomes a commercial commodity. Sean Lockie explains that engineers will have to understand how a low carbon economy of the future may change a building’s design now.

The UK now has some world leading policy and regulations in the area of climate change and next year pressure on the industry will increase as the Carbon Reduction Commitment and the 25% improvement to energy performance in building regulations (Part L) both become law.

Planners are also demanding on site generation and improvements on Part L and the environmental assessment criteria group BREEAM’s standards are mandatory for government estate.

Then there are the various zero carbon trajectories − such as 2016 for domestic, 2019 for non-domestic and 2018 for the government estate. Government departments are now also talking about a low carbon economy. But what fiscal influences play a part in the transformation?

The first area is a price for externalities. An externality is an attempt to assess the impact from a human activity. Economists for some time have been trying to put a price on these impacts. For example, if a material is quarried an externality would include a price for making good the site after the minerals have been exploited. The same is now true for carbon.

The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) recommends a shadow cost of carbon to take into account its global warming impact, and so it conducted the Stern Review, which was published in 2006. So what are the impacts of adding this externality, or tax, on to a building project? Faithful+Gould has attempted to model the various economic impacts.

Once the Carbon Reduction Commitment begins to mature in 2011, a new market in carbon trading will emerge that could see increases in the costs per tonne. It predicts that carbon will become more of a commodity in construction projects with developers buying carbon budgets for projects under polluter pays principles.

As buildings get closer towards zero carbon design the proportion of carbon that goes into making and assembling the construction components becomes more significant. Unfortunately, there are some real issues in this area. All the recent government papers have been silent on embodied carbon − the consultation on Part L, the zero carbon definition, the Low Carbon Industrial Strategy and low carbon economy documents.

The challenge for industry in calculating embodied carbon is the lack of a consistent methodology, assessment boundary, and robust factors for various components. Then, when overall embodied carbon is calculated, what benchmark is it compared to and how are emissions mitigated?

Those that are offering to assess a building’s embodied carbon tend to use factors assembled by the University of Bath. Although a good start, these need a massive overhaul with UK specific data and analysis if they are to be relied upon.

If the industry is going to tackle embodied carbon it needs:

• More data from manufacturers
• Help on setting assessment boundaries
• Regulatory bodies to ask for it
• More reliable factors
• Carbon budgets (not just shadow)
• Rules of thumb
• Benchmarks

So where is the embedded carbon? Faithful+Gould and others have done some analysis in this area and conclude the emissions fall roughly in particular areas.

The analysis also found that 80% of carbon was in about 20% of the cost items. This has meant that in the short term designers know where to concentrate to get the biggest bang for buck. What about existing buildings? Roughly 50% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions come from existing buildings. Faithful+Gould and Atkins are developing a master list of solutions.

These are a very helpful way of sitting down with a client who wants to make emission reductions but does not know where to start − focus is likely to be in the easy low cost items first.

• Sean Lockie is sustainability director at project and cost management consultant Faithful+Gould

Valuation

The evidence for increasing a property’s value by making sure it has an optimal energy performance is still being gathered at the moment and conclusions are hard to reach.

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Communities and Local Government have been looking at the valuation process in energy lean domestic properties though and similar work is being done by the US Green Building Council.

It does strongly suggest that clients may already be commissioning engineers, architects and cost consultants to evaluate their carbon knowledge as at least a partial factor.

Longer term it could become a primary factor because of the cost implications of losing control of a carbon budget, so understanding the economics of the low carbon economy will become vital.