Looks like our Buildings as Batteries event on 28 of this month will be as much a voyage of discovery – one of those exploratory events we seem to love – as an opportunity to absorb hard and fast data.
This makes sense because we’re exploring a new branch of knowledge in pursuit of a critical goal that no-one has ever engaged in before. No wonder it’s complex and can seem confusing.
Which is why we’ve assembled a great cross-section of panellists, and presenters and even seeded some excellent brains in the audience to throw their knowledge into the arena – Socratic style.
We love a good to and fro as our readers will all know.
The cross-section is exciting.
Craig Roussac of Buildings Alive will share his work on time-of-use energy management where energy costs vary by an extraordinary amount – the equivalent of 10 cents in the daytime and 1 cent at night. Yet no one he knows is taking advantage of this.
Why not?
Where are all those sophisticated building management systems doing exactly?
Hi tech people need to let us know.
Our big office towers let us not forget are still massive users of energy – not because of lights, not because of lifts but because we need to maintain their indoor temperatures at a fine balance. And that comes at a huge cost.
Jorge Chapa from the Green Building Council and Alison Scotland from Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (see our podcast with Alison here) will give us the big and often complex picture of how these bright ideas get translated to practice and then policies.
Can the same energy savings scenarios that Craig proposes be adapted to industrial buildings? Can our Big Sheds be part of our grid solutions?
After all, these are big burly things on the edges of our cities, where not many people notice them as whizz past on a freeway headed to somewhere else but which, in fact, are the enablers of the modern, enabled and fortunate life we now all expect in this wealthy country of ours. These are the silent sleeping giants that source our goods and distribute them to us at the speed of light.
Let’s find out if they indeed can be part of our energy solutions
Jacob Clark of Dexus will take us on a bird’s eye view of the huge industrial property portfolio he works on. Some of that work is still under wraps – such as details of the batteries Dexus is keen to lead on in the sector and how it’s managing the ESG disclosure rules for itself and its often equally large tenants, for instance.
Much of the intel has been a little hard to prise from Jacob in the lead up to the reporting season but we’re expecting good results – especially in a live format and under the subtle pressure that a peer group can exert.
Melissa Doelhi of Endeavour Energy has a massively important role to play to see if we can make Big Sheds part of the solution with energy.
Her work involves the supply of energy to western Sydney where most of the giant sheds are located. There are plans to cope with the surge of demand from sophisticated high energy consuming distribution centres, she says, and also how to integrate surplus energy with the grid. But the missing piece is how to create incentives for owners and how government comes to the table with all the retailers. There are promising signs, she says.
Tim Washington’s work at JET Charge is one of the reasons that Melissa’s job will only become more demanding. He’s putting in EV charging stations in as many commercial and industrial buildings as possible.
What will the drain on the grid be? Will the energy consumed be renewable or dirty coal at night?
Part of the story will be looking at the challenges of fire risk and how insurers are dealing with it. Some overspecify risk mitigation but others have sound practical advice that works.
We’re expecting some highly regarded input on that score on the day and to see what engineers are doing to protect everyone.
Summer Steward from TeamGlobalExpress (previously Toll) works for one of the biggest tenants in the Big Sheds. As a distributor her company is potentially one of the big energy user, like Amazon. So her story will be core to the drivers in this industry.
(To share some of the scale of what is no surprise to those who work among these giants, Amazon last year announced it was building a distribution centre in Melbourne the size of 11 Melbourne Cricket Grounds. And there’s more to come it seems…)
Simon Carter works for ESR Australia which houses these tenants. Its global parent company ESG Group recently bought another big property owner in the same field, LOGOS, so it’s now even bigger with $S156 billion funds under management globally.
When we spoke to him on Thursday Carter had just come from checking out one of the big sites he needs to keep an ESG eye on and noted the impact that the intermodal hub at Moorebank 35 kilometres south west of Sydney has had.
“Moorebank has been a game changer,” he said. It connects a train line from Port Botany and big freeways, making it a perfect locations for retailers such as Woolworths, which chose the place for its $1.2 billion national distribution centre with “45 metres high bay roofs” and fully automated facilities such as unloaders, cranes, straddlers (like the ones you see at ports) – all electric.
Carter says Woolies is moving all its trucks to EVs.
That’s a lot of energy that will reduce greenhouse emissions if the energy is from renewables (and not, if they charging is at night when the grid is coal fired). But whatever the vehicles emissions, look down in these big sheds and around them and you’ll notice vast expanses of solid concrete hard stands – with its equally vast embodied emissions – that the trucks and the other heavy equipment rely on for stability.
Holcim is trialling low emissions concrete but it’s early days, Carter notes. And yes, it’s tough. See our recent (partnered) story on SmartCrete CRC, which is a learning curve in itself on just how hard and how important it is to decarbonise concrete.
Then check out our report on the CIBSE webinar, The need for speed moderated by TFE, which blew open some more hard facts, such as the observation from Philip Oldfield from University of New South Wales that we build more than Japan’s total building stock, every year.
We’ve got a lot of work to do
In today’s world where the supply chain disruptions have caused a shift in the dominant paradigm from “just in time” to “just in case” – some distribution giants are getting way bigger than we had any idea about.
What this means for ESG performance and the new disclosure rules around scope 3 emissions is influencing the directions of these not so sleepy giants.
That’s what our event has been designed to unpack.
If you’re involved in supplying or managing energy to our commercial and industrial world, be there. You need to hear what our experts say and we want to hear from you.
And hopefully we can pull together the framework for an ebook to dive even deeper into this amazing story.