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12/08/12 at 05:23Of that, the largest single chunk of abatement will come from co- or trigeneration, hopefully saving 1.4 megatonnes of CO2e per annum by the end of the decade.
Cathy Oke, the Green who runs council's environment portfolio, says Sydney's grid is better suited to trigen, (...) , (...) , Melbourne's substations are a barrier. If trigen turns out to be less than it's cracked up to be, that may turn out to be a good thing.
The costs are unknown, but will emerge from the current tender process. Getting generous recognition under the Green Building Council's star-rating system, trigen is becoming a fad among landlords, (...) . GPT, Stockland and Mirvac have all struck trigen units in recent office developments.
Sydney started small. It brought in British sustainability expert Allan Jones, credited with taking Woking Borough, near London ''off the grid'' 14 years ago. Mr Jones is now working full-time at the Town Hall as climate change strategist, bringing the colonies up to speed.
He cites a recent Maastricht University study that showed Australian commercial property owners crowding right at the top on energy efficiency.
''If we concentrate on energy efficiency and the network concentrates on the carbon intensity of supply, therein lies the solution. Sydney and Melbourne, to their credit, are saying 'what can we do?' but they don't own the network and they don't own the buildings, http://www.abercrombieparis4france.com .''
''Clearly our electricity network in Australia needs to be cleaned up. We're very energy efficient but very carbon inefficient,'' he says.
Investa Property Group has installed a 700 kilowatt trigen unit at its latest office redevelopment, Ark, in North Sydney. Craig Roussac, http://www.abercrombieparis4france.com , Investa's sustainability manager, says the unit was halved in size so that it would only ever supply 40 per cent of the building's peak load, (...) . It is currently switched off until the building is fully leased.
Sydney has lagged Melbourne on sustainability, and is trying to catch up, mainly by spruiking its trigeneration plans, (...) . Sydney wants 70 per cent of the municipality's energy to come from trigen by 2030 and estimates it will need to install 325 megawatts of capacity. That's a lot. Effectively, a whole new power station in town.
Melbourne's lord mayor Robert Doyle told a Sydney radio show recently: ''It is the centre of our cities that drive our problems and that's where the solutions will have to be found.''
Cr Doyle says Melbourne is looking to New York, rather than London, and is focusing on retrofitting two-thirds of the city's existing properties with its ''1200 buildings'' project. The aim is to cut CO2e emissions by 400, (...) , (...) ,000 tonnes a year, attracting $1.3 billion in private investment.
But Roussac says there is plenty of evidence of energy savings as high as 50 per cent from a combination of retrofitting and better energy management.
Trigeneration - getting electricity, heating and cooling from local gas-fired power units - is a key tactic for each city but doubts are surfacing about how widely the technology should be used in Australia.
The baseline was 2006 when 5.5 megatonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) were emitted in the city area. The council is looking to save 3.9 megatonnes of CO2e each year by 2030. The largest part of that - 24 per cent, or 1.3 megatonnes - will come from trigeneration.
Roussac says Investa hasn't fallen for trigen. ''Trigen is a supply-side technology. As building owners, we're fundamentally on the demand side of the equation, (...) .''
Mr Jones counters that eventually the city will use syngas (synthesised gas) derived from municipal waste, but the track record of councils here is underwhelming.
These are huge numbers - ballpark, each CBD accounts for 1 per cent of the country's emissions.
Which means this - if you install a great big gas-fired generator to provide 80 per cent of your power, you have no incentive to save more than 20 per cent of your energy. It creates a ''floor'' for energy efficiency.
The lord mayor of Sydney is independent state MP Clover Moore, and she wants to cut greenhouse gas emissions within the local government area - total emissions by the council, ratepayers and visitors - by 70 per cent by 2030.
THEY'RE not in competition mind, but the mayors of Sydney and Melbourne are out-greening state and federal leaders with ambitious CO2 reduction targets, (...) , with huge implications for property owners in each CBD.
Melbourne City Council plans deeper and faster cuts, aiming to achieve zero net emissions by 2020, (...) , which means eliminating or offsetting 5.8 megatonnes of CO2e.
Mr Jones wants our ''energy dinosaurs'' to get out of the way and let the council sell power to the city's biggest landlords, touting emissions savings of up to 45 per cent from the capture of heat energy otherwise wasted at far-off power stations, or energy lost in transmission.
 , (...) ;
Cr Moore is sold. ''We want to do it precinct-by-precinct in our big urban renewal areas and make sure we don't use coal-fired power that is transported from the Hunter Valley,'' she says.
''Trigen uses absorption chillers as a way of delivering 'coolth' [as in warmth] into buildings,'' says Mr Wright. ''Rather than investing in a gas plant that will run for 50 years, you can do the same thing with heat pumps, driving them with renewable electricity.''
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Some green groups are less excited. Beyond Zero Emissions director Matthew Wright criticises trigen as ''thinking small'' and points out it is still reliant on fossil fuels and a gas grid - arguably riskier than the electricity grid.
The city had expressions of interest from 17 groups in the first stage of the trigeneration agenda: to install 25 megawatts of capacity across seven sites: the Town Hall, Customs House and the city's five aquatic centres, by 2015. Some big players are in there, such as AGL, TRU, UGL, Dalkia, and Honeywell.