Paolo Bevilacqua is group head of sustainability for Frasers Property Limited. The role is with the parent company that owns Frasers Property Australia, one of the earliest and most courageous movers on the sustainability and greening front. Think the Burwood Brickworks Shopping Centre in Melbourne, a Living Building Challenge project that really challenged the thinking on what is possible in development. Not to mention those who worked on it.
Paolo Bevilacqua will speak at Urban Greening 2023 on 27 April 2023.
Imagine producing 105 per cent of the energy you consume, as the certification demands. Easy if you’re building a sealed room, said one of the executives tasked with this job. But a shopping centre designed to be open and inviting with no barriers to entry? Extremely difficult.
Bevilacqua is not averse to a challenge himself. Over the years since he joined Frasers (initially Australand) after more than 10 years at Lendlease he’s held a myriad of roles.
One of the most interesting was to lead sustainability in the industrial sector, at the time considered one of the hardest to transform to low carbon. Think about tenants who are disengaged with the sustainability cause and might be part of the fiercely competitive logistics business, known for its focus on microscopic margins to stay ahead of the competition – not how to put solar panels on the roofs not structurally designed to do so.
Things have changed since those days and today there’s an appetite for sustainability in industrial property too.
After that Bevilacqua took on an even more challenging role, that of heading up an energy business for Frasers. It was on the back of the successful and, again, a breakthrough, energy project at the Central Park development on the edge of Sydney’s CBD.
This led to the idea of starting an energy utilities business. “I was brought into the process of developing the business case for that and was really honoured to be given the opportunity to run it and set it up with a business case that got approved, he says on the podcast.
“But on day one, I was sitting there on my own… I’d never run a utilities business before. And it had not been done before by a property company.” At least not in this model that retailed energy externally to energy customers.
“It led to a lot of learning; very steep learning curve.”
And it’s a learning curve that will no doubt continue to develop.