Australia still doing bare minimum on new-build home energy efficiency

New housing in Australia must meet minimum energy performance requirements. We wondered how many buildings exceeded the minimum standard. What our analysis found is that four in five new houses are being built to the minimum standard and a negligible proportion to an optimal performance standard.

NatHERS star ratings across total data set for new housing approvals, May 2016–December 2018. 

Before these standards were introduced the average performance of housing was found to be around 1.5 stars. The current minimum across most of Australia is six stars under the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS).

This six-star minimum falls short of what is optimal in terms of environmental, economic and social outcomes. It’s also below the minimum set by many other countries.

There have been calls for these minimum standards to be raised. However, many policymakers and building industry stakeholders believe the market will lift performance beyond minimum standards and so there is no need to raise these.

Read the story from One Step Off the Grid by The Conversation -  “Australia still doing bare minimum on new-build home energy efficiency.”

Electrify Everything & Save The Planet!

Have you ever wondered why so many of the items we use on a daily basis are switching away from fossil fuel power to electricity? About 80% of the world’s GHG emissions are a direct or indirect result of extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Electricity offers a more efficient, lower-cost, and sustainable energy alternative to fossil fuel power.

Yes, we need to electrify everything.

Consumer energy technologies fall into two basic types: those that run on electricity (anything that plugs in or has a battery) and those that directly combust fuels like oil, gasoline, natural gas, or biomass. Let’s zoom in specifically on vehicles to understand the importance of electrification.

The gas-powered internal combustion engine is intrinsically inefficient. Less than a quarter of the energy consumed is used to drive the vehicle — the balance is rejected as waste heat. The preferable scenario is to choose electricity to drive our vehicles of all sizes and capacities. If that were the case, more than 90% of the energy devoted to our personal transportation would be deployed usefully. Let’s translate that in a different way. We could provide the driving potential of a gallon of gasoline by substituting as few as 8 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity.

Read the story by Carolyn Fortuna on CleanTechnica - “Electrify Everything & Save The Planet!”

Questions about the wisdom behind Melbourne's White Night

Those of us concerned about the overt and seemingly careless use of energy have wondered about the wisdom driving Melbourne’s “White Night”.

Liquid Sky at Fed Square will look a lot like Poetic
Kinetics' previous Los Angeles sculpture Liquid Shard
- yesterday's winds disrupted installation, but maybe it
was little more than nature making a statement.

The event, introduced in 2013 was based on a similar festival first staged in Paris in 2002, appears contradictory to everything we are being told about conserving energy.

Regularly we are urged to turn off unnecessary lights, even to the extent of making sure that units connected to the grid are not on standby, rather turned off completely.

Melbourne’s White Night, despite its amazing success, appears to contradict those philosophies - it’s about turning the lights on!

Read the story by Hannah Francis on The Age - “White Night Melbourne 2018 survival guide.”