What surprised our audience and panellists at our Buildings as Batteries event on Wednesday was that the quality of the speakers and the audience alike was very much on par.
Since the start, there has been strong concentration on the content and deep engagement through the questions and comments that followed this lively event.
Even the online audience picked up the vibe. One said they were inspired by the calibre of the action-focused conversations. Another told us in person that while there were plenty of inhouse meetings and discussions about these issues inside leading companies, there were not across sectors.
Those who were there to saw how buildings in the CBDs were electrifying and their potential to become the batteries for our energy supplies when the sun doesn’t shine etcetera. And then to also look at the giant industrial “sheds” emerging to house the business of big retail distributors and see if these too could become part of the solution.
It’s a hot topic.
And like the best of our events – one that not many people know a lot about. Quite frankly, it’s very early days, and the information gaps are big, with not many answers as yet.
The key point is everyone has to work together to find solutions to everything in sustainability. All the various strings of thoughts and innovation need to find fertile places to plug in where they meet solutions and business cases in order to yield the power for change. Just like the topic we’re dealing with.
In sustainability, we’re talking complex systems.
It’s still a tiny cross section of the broad interests that this topic touches.
The people in the room offered scope for optimism. Here’s a sample from the audience side alone: Sourced Energy, Downer, Lendlease, Solo, EC Focus, Bradfield Development Authority, Turner & Townsend, Microgrid Power, City of Sydney, ER&D, CSIRO, Bridgeford, Onewater, Charter Hall, Brickfields Consulting, Quantum Insights, Northrop Consulting, Talent Nation, Shellharbour Anglican College.
As Alex Sear of ADP said in a lively and packed presentation – it’s a topic that brings together many of the moving parts reshaping our world: the climate emergency, batteries, our driving preferences and technology.
In a conversation on Thursday, one of the attendees noted the massive reshaping of our industrial sector pretty much while we weren’t looking (too deeply) …what was going on under those vast roof spaces that we drive past on our way out of town? In a few words, it’s our new consumer spending habits amped up to the speed of light. It’s what’s behind those exciting boxes that arrive on our doorstep.
Simon Carter from ESR says it’s the shift from “just in time” retailing to “just in case”.
Blame the geopolitical instability for making our supply chain tsars nervous as hell and, therefore, making their shed bigger and more stuffed with “stuff” than ever before.
First, it was COVID that showed us that even the humble toilet paper roll could one day become a fighting matter.
Imagine then the chaos and inflation that followed the dearth of building materials exactly at a time that the then federal government decided that to pump prime the building industry was a good way to crawl out of the hole that an invisible organism had plunged us into, along with the rest of the world.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine showed that our timber supply was not safe – we import most of it, and most of what we import was from Russia, from regions declared Forest Stewardship Council certified until it wasn’t – and declared conflict timber instead.
Consequence? Added to the rest of the supply chain woes that hit at the same time, the entire economy goes into inflationary meltdown, plunging growing numbers of people into poverty, housing insecurity and even hunger – in a country as rich as ours, shamefully.
You’ll think our take on how the Big Sheds reflects those changes is no doubt a bit flowery at best. But those Big Sheds tell a story that’s far deeper than steel frames and tin roofs.
These days they’re not just bigger but more energy guzzling than ever. The biggest – those operated by Nike, Lululemon or Amazon – have high-tech specialised equipment. At some of these facilities, you’re likely to find a modem-type device for every 100 square metres or so, said Jacob Clark of Dexus.
Then add the retrieval system, the electrified forklifts and so on. Summer Steward of Team Global Express shared some of the complexity and energy demands of the company’s trial of 60 electric trucks at its Bungarribee facility at Eastern Creek, northwest of Sydney. Not to mention the hardware/software systems, conveyor belts and retrieval systems.
As Clark said: “Just think about the amount of data that’s required to program [these facilities], and the demand is exponential.”
Then there is the black hole world of how much energy is needed to power data centres, which Endeavour Energy’s Melissa Doueihi said most people did not see coming. And that’s even before AI came along.
AGL’s Jason Layt told the audience his company is the biggest solar installer for commercial and industrial buildings in the country. This is great news – we love to see these old fossil fuelers switching across, and we are keen to encourage them.
Boosting the trend is that the National Construction Code mandates that 100 per cent of industrial sheds be solar panel-ready. It sounds good, and it sounds promising. But unfortunately, what we heard on Wednesday is that the solar potential won’t necessarily be shared with the grid – at least not yet.
Big tenants such as Amazon and especially the big retailers such as Coles and Woolworths often want to keep the energy for themselves first because their needs are so big and secondly because they want redundancy in case there’s a grid meltdown.
The job of the industry is possibly how to incentivise the owners and tenants of the Big Sheds to come up with a plan to share their solar power and conserve it for nighttime use, which is still the biggest challenge in our world.
Because as Craig Roussac of Buildings Alive pointed out we have a very serious problem with the question of time of use of electricity, the story that kicked off this entire event. You might think you’re doing the right thing by powering up your EV at night, he said, but consider that New South Wales, at night, has “pretty much the dirtiest electricity on the planet with a couple of Indian states excluded”.
There is much more to share. Stay tuned.
– Tina Perinotto
