COMMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS: Finally catching our breath after Urban Greening 2023 and already planning for the next big project (hint: electrifying our buildings, a series of five masterclasses) to chat to a few of the well-connected stalwarts of the commercial property engineering world.
So what’s rocking their world? Certainly not the impending so-called recession imported from the US that is supposed to have us quaking in our boots.
The people we spoke to on Tuesday say business is brisk.
The federal government seems to be at least on the same side as the green team at present with the Net Zero Authority announced and coming soon the $15.2 million National Energy Performance Strategy that’s already tickling the fancy of the quick and the keen.
The collective work that delivered Every Building Counts a few years ago – from the Green Building Council of Australia and the Property Council recently joined with Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (ASBEC) for relaunch of the document (pictured) to make it absolutely clear (because it was a bit on the murky side in V1 ) that gas for residential property was most definitely out. The previous version allowed the gas industry to do a spot of what it does best, gaslighting.
But let’s not be too complacent about this and think the fight against gas is gone. According to engineering and sustainability expert Bruce Precious, the gas industry can crow that out of the 11 million or so homes in Australia, 5.2 million are connected to gas and it expects that number to swell to 7 million by 2040.
If you find this shocking, as you might the sweet little tele ads (with little kiddies in their jammies, straight out of the bath) telling us that gas is a renewable fuel, warm and cuddly, then it’s time for the same wake-up call we had.
The commercial property industry at the top end might be embracing electrification but it’s a hard road for everyone else to jump on at speed. And especially with the gas industry taking marketing and manipulation lessons from their coal and oil cousins.
The white-labelled Energy Networks Australia says 65 per cent of Australian households are connected to gas. The good news is that this number is from 2021. In 2017 they were crowing about 70 per cent.
So down, but far from out.
In Precious’ view, “that just doesn’t accord with a net zero future”.
It’s a comment we need to amplify for the federal government, which we hope still has its hearing and antennas in good and bristling working order. The moves are good, they’re in the right direction. But hey, the leaders in the property industry from what we can see in our chat on Tuesday and elsewhere, want more, faster.
What’s new is the language around the disclosure of energy and comfort performance of residential property. Big difference to the first version, where, as Precious points out “if you’re not an energy nerd”, you might have taken at face value the gas industry saying to not worry about a transition – “the infrastructure is in place, we’ve pumped all this money into the gas pipes we may as well keep the thing going”. “It’s the sunk cost fallacy,” Precious says.
The gaslighters don’t care. They’re pinning their hopes on new connections rising. (And no doubt a lot of help from their lobbying mates in high places.)
In other interesting resi news the CSIRO is funding work to develop a NatHERS energy efficiency standard disclosure methodology with CoreLogic (whose executive research director Tim Lawless joined one of our panels for Urban Greening – Special Report out soon). Sounds like a move in the right direction.
Years and years ago we remember asking the hedonic resi index developers to include sustainability in their analysis, since their clever systems could already sort for number of bedrooms, construction fabric, pools and so on. How hard was it to add in solar panels and insulation? But no. We had to wait till 2023.
The commercial world is leaving gas behind
In the commercial buildings space how hard is it to make the switch? We’re gathering from our dives into the topic including of course, our Extreme Green Buildings ebook, that it’s more complicated than we’d like.
One of the problems, Precious explained, is that even in new buildings the size of space requirements to accommodate heat pumps is much bigger than the space boilers take up.
The good news is that there is less and less pushback from property owners to the electrification noises from the GBCA, which he says is a signal that the designers are getting comfortable with the transition.
Steve Hennessy sustainability consultant with WT, notes that umm…not all engineers actually have to undertake sustainability learning in to keep up their engineering CPD (continuing educational development) points.
That’s interesting. Explains a lot. Maybe.
Like that gas keeps getting specified in buildings.
But Hennessy says that’s changing with the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) now requiring sustainability a part of keeping up the qualifications.
We need to catch up with Engineers Australia and hope to see similar moves there.
On the broader commercial property front Hennessy says he can see a whole new raft of reporting pain coming as property owners start to get their carbon story in order and as the attention inevitably starts to move to scope 3 emissions. These are the emissions created by the people or companies who come into your patch. If it’s an engineer or a tradie that might not be such a hard call, though probably tough for the tradie who’s driven to the Sydney CBD from Mt Druitt and is already struggling with the cost of keeping the massive diesel 4WD on the road that Scotty Morrison ridiculously encouraged with overly generous taxation write-down provisions.
All tough enough, but who’s game to have that “little chat” with the tenants to see what their emissions bring to the premises. Maybe, we offered, those emissions should be captured in the tenants’ own reporting regime. If you have views on this, you know where we are!
Refrigerants are another issue.
Hennessy reckons that as the scope 1 and 2 emissions are tamed and tamped down rising up will be the increasingly visible and by proportion, huge “refrigerant fugitive emissions”.
“They will soon become quite important in determining the carbon footprint of buildings, not least because we are moving away from gas and moving towards 100 per cent renewable power, so reducing or even eliminating the other Scope 1 and 2 emissions,” he said.
As for the embodied water disclosure requirement the mood among the people Hennessy talks to is that it’s a good thing to do but there’s a twinge of concern that it might become a distraction to the urgent work on the table… and yes we know it’s all connected and all important. (Our new catch cry is “everything, everywhere, all at once. And thanks for the hook, Davina Rooney chief executive of the GBCA. We bit and it’s stuck!)
The skills, the skills, and the house prices
In engineering the common complaint is skills shortages and in Queensland the huge surge of population moving north is pushing up prices for trades, so that plumbers and carpenters are reportedly earning around $240,000 a year – and that’s probably true by the time various components of take home pay are added in, Hennessy says, quoting one of his building company sources.
But it’s not just the demand side price hikes that might be attracting the shift north for tradies. Hennessy also noted that someone quite close to him, an engineer, gave up on finding an affordable house near the centre of Sydney and together with her partner has upped sticks and moved to Brisbane to buy a property for about half the price of Sydney property.