When I think about wind farms, I tend to think of sweeping grasslands, rolling hills, or blustery coastlines. I don’t tend to think about commercial office buildings.
Well it seems I should, since the Mercury reports that the ANZ Building and Marine Board Building in Hobart plan on installing roof-top wind turbines to reduce electricity grid demand.
Each building would have four of the vertical-axis wind turbines, which the applicants said would produce 120,000 kilowatt hours a year. That was the equivalent of about 12 per cent of the Marine Board Building’s total energy consumption and about 10 per cent of the ANZ Building’s.
According to According to XSquared Architects Director Keith Drew “This will equate to a reduction of approximately 120,000kg of CO2 per annum.”
Unfortunately, Keith doesn’t seem to know too much about calculating greenhouse gas emissions. You see, Tasmania uses predominantly hydro-electricity, which means the grid average CO2 emissions per kilowatt are far lower than in NSW where black coal is used, and much lower than Victoria where brown coal is widely used.
According to the National Greenhouse Accounts, every kilowatt of electricity generated in Tasmania results in 0.12kg of CO2, compared to 0.91kg in QLD, 0.89kg in NSW or 1.22kg in VIC.
So what that really means is that these wind turbines will actually save about 14 tonnes of CO2/year, not 120 tonnes. So in other words, you could achieve the same result with about $300 worth of voluntary offsets (at $20/tonne). Even 120 tonnes is pretty small bickies, and may well be found by making operational changes, like adjusting the heating set points, or the building start-up/shutdown procedures.
What really annoys me about this is that this project is probably going to get funded under the Federal Government Green Building Fund, which means another more deserving project, which would actually reduce emissions, is going to miss out. I hope whoever is reviewing this submission to the Green Building Fund is clever enough to realise this, and deny them the money.
That’s not to say that wind power, or other renewables don’t have a place in the built environment. In fact, I completely see the value, provided they are well thought out, and not just done because someone thinks it looks cool.
There is definitely a call for distributed energy generation, which basically means generating energy closer to where it is actually used via a number of smaller sources, rather than a long way away, from one dirty great coal-fired power station. We are seeing this already with the growth of co- and tri-generation systems in buildings around Australia, and I’ll write more about this in a later post.
However, given what I’ve said about Tasmania using hydro-electricity, we would probably be better off focusing on the other states where the difference in CO2 emissions between the electricity grid and on-site renewables is actually substantial.
Mr Drew said a Federal Government Green Building Fund grant would help pay for the installation of the turbines on the 1970s Marine Board Building, which was bought by Rockefeller in June last year.
Posted by matthewclifford 
