Leading by example
Government leadership in carbon footprint reductions would have the dual benefit of setting an example and helping the local green tech industry get established.
Australians have a very large environmental footprint.
Each of us consumes the resources produced by seven hectares of land, which puts us in the top ten in the world. If you want to see how we compare with other countries, go here.
Our continuing wastefulness is not a good thing.
There is only some much the planet can take before we use up our entire environmental overdraft and the debt is called in all at once. We and our children may be safe from the planet’s eventual retribution, but the generations that follow may curse us for our wastefulness and our negligence.
The Commonwealth Government has taken a few positive steps to reduce the size of the overdraft, announcing a plan to encourage households to reduce energy use and putting a carbon tax on the agenda to reduce energy use by the business sector – and implicitly by households also.
However, it has done little to get its own house in order.
Yes, after much time-wasting, green building standards have been adopted for the public service and tentative steps have been taken to reduce the enormous energy demands due to the ever growing use of information and communication technologies.
But that is about it.
I think that if the Government expects households and businesses to do their bit, then it should get the ball rolling; it should set an example. Here is how it could and should be done.
The Commonwealth Government owns or controls a huge number of buildings, with hectares of roof space ready and waiting to be adorned by photovoltaic cells to generate power for the building and probably leaving enough spare to feed a few megawatts into the grid. Let’s start with that, including of course buildings not yet finished, like the monstrosity that will eventually house ASIO in Canberra, which will have enough roof space to power half of Canberra, by the looks of it.
Then let’s make use of the many large plots of land owned by the Commonwealth, most of which seem to be in the hands of Defence. Why not install a larger scale photovoltaic power generating capacity at each of those sites.
A conservative estimate, assuming that each site can support five megawatts, is that Defence could contribute several hundred megawatts to the grid, which would only be fair, given the amount of energy the Defence Department and the ADF consume merely to support their ICT and their operations.
Defence is the largest consumer of electricity within the Commonwealth Government and it is doing very little to change that situation.
Both of these initiatives will pay for themselves and would make a huge contribution to the development of the solar power industry in Australia – and, of course, they would place the Commonwealth Government on the moral high ground, by setting the right example.
Now, what could states and territories and local government do?
Patrick Callioni is a former senior public servant, with the Queensland and Australian Governments, and is now the Managing Director of consulting company, Enterprise Intelligence Pty Ltd, which specialises in helping business to do business with government and vice-versa. www.enterpriseintelligence.net.au His books Compliance Regulation and Financial Services & Waves of Change: Managing Global Trends in the Financial Services Industry are available at Amazon
WayForward
November 25, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Carbon Footprints Reduction
While Patrick raises some valid points about Australia’s carbon footprint we must also consider the land mass of Australia which is also the 10th largest in the world, our geography and climate, industry and commerce, population density and all the other usual factors. Otherwise we are really comparing apples with oranges. Australia in particular has a large land area with relatively few people. Therefore we have less public transport infrastructure for a smaller population, we must ship goods further around our country, drive further to reach our destinations, we have larger land areas and use this land for farming and cattle which produce greenhouse gases and there are many more examples.
While some reduction of energy consumption is reasonable to expect, the way forward is far more complicated. This is not too say we can’t make some reductions but on the whole there is only so far a country like Australia can go in reducing its carbon footprint through reduction in energy consumption which I would dissent from calling “wastefulness” as Patrick put it.
So what are we doing right now?
The Australian Government has the Solar for Schools scheme where every school around the country is entitled to a $50,000 grant to create their own renewable energy system that includes solar and wind power. Click here for more information. Here we have examples all around our country of the adoption of renewable energy by our schools. Ask the schools in your local community about what they have done with their renewable energy grants. If they haven’t taken theirs out then get them to take action!
On top of the Federal Government’s renewable energy initiatives the state governments around Australia provide feed-in tariffs for grid connected renewable energy production from residential and small energy usage customers. Other schemes that have recently finished include the remote renewable energy scheme. Recently the Queensland government spent millions providing renewable energy for remote communities. Click here for more information. The New South Wales government through their feed-in tariff (NSW Solar Bonus Scheme) offered 60 cents per kilowatt hour of power fed back into the state power grid by small renewable energy customers. It blew its target of 50 megawatts produced by renewable energy out of the water and has dropped the feed-in tariff rate to 20 cents due to its overwhelming popularity. Click here for further information.
So what more can we do?
Currently around the world an ever growing force of technological innovation is creating solutions to our climate change problems. From carbon nanotube air cleaning technologies that literally clean our polluting ways to ever increasing solar panel efficiency, better wind turbine efficiency, reduction in power usage through LED light technology, mainstream electric cars, large capacity power storage for renewable energy and much more.
This is a time for us to look forward with optimism at the future and to take leadership through technological innovation to not only stop but indeed to turn around climate change and provide a history that future generations can look back on and feel pride and admiration.
We are very much on the verge where renewable energy such as solar, wind and tide power are on par with traditional energy production such as coal fire. At the current rate of investment in these technologies we should find in the next five years that a major shift in energy production takes place with increasing reliability placed on cheaper renewable energy.