Green Energy Market Keeps Growing QuicklyFirst published in Contractor Construction, October 2001,©Reed Business Information Australia 2001 |
 ©Reed Business Information Australia |
In April this year, Commonwealth legislation in the form of the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000, came into force, requiring electricity providers to generate an extra 9,500 gigawatt hours of electricity per year from renewable sources by 2010, writes Katrina Fox
Technologies which can produce this include wind power, solar, hydro-electric and biomass. Solar energy directly utilises the heat or light from the sun in the production of electricity, in the form of photovoltaic cells which are connected together to make PV panels which can further be linked to form arrays. The latter are used for large projects which require a lot of power. Building Integrated PV (BIPV) is the application of this technology into buildings by replacing conventional materials, so a roof, for example, made from PV modules would function as both building skin and power generator.
Wind turbines are designed to convert the energy of wind movement (kinetic energy) into mechanical power. In wind turbine generators, this mechanical energy is converted into electricity.
Biomass energy is derived from plant and animal material, such as wood from forests, agricultural crops, industrial, human and animal wastes. There are various forms of technologies which convert the biomass, including gasification, into electricity.
Hydro-electric power is electricity produced by the movement of fresh water from rivers and lakes. Water is collected and stored in a dam above a power station for use when it is required.
The two key technologies that are likely to be most commercially viable for Australia, in the near future, according to experts, are wind farms and biomass, although the latter has its disadvantages in terms of encouraging deforestation, leading to serious ecological and social ramifications. Solar power is currently popular in remote locations where access to the grid is restricted. It is used here for lighting, water pumping and in water treatment systems, but its use on a larger scale will not be feasible until the cost of manufacturing the solar cells decreases considerably. When this happens it will be a major competitor in the renewable energy stakes.
Hydro power is unlikely to be used on a large scale because of its significant environmental impacts which include flooding, displacement of indigenous communities and damage to local fauna and flora. Proposed hydro power projects often face pressure from environmental and human rights groups.
On the wind energy front, government-owned company Stanwell is involved in projects all over Australia and Pacific Hydro is the biggest developer of wind farms. The biomass market is headed by Energy Developments Limited (EDL) which recently received $11 million in federal funding for the installation and commercial use of its Carburetted Gas Turbine to produce energy from low concentrations of methane gas inside coal mines. EDL will install four generators at the German Creek coal mine in NSW. The firm also has other projects planned which make use of its SWERF (Solid Waste and Energy Recycling Facility) process which recycles and converts household rubbish into electricity.
As far as the opportunities for the construction industry in these areas go, they are potentially huge. 'You'll see a significant number of new power producers coming into the market', managing director of the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Renewable Energy Frank Reid says. 'The estimated cost of the provision of the 9,500 gigawatt hours of electricity from renewable sources is between $2 billion and $4 billion over the next 10 years and a significant amount of that will go into construction infrastructure. The type and level of work will vary hugely - if you look at biomass plants, then you're looking at substantial works. Similarly with waste treatment plants there will be fairly substantial mechanical works. With large scale wind farms, you will see a significant amount of civil works with regard to site access and preparation'.
Graham
Redding, manager, renewable energy for consulting firm Sinclair Knight
Merz and major adviser to the Commonwealth government in the development
of the new legislation, agrees. 'At this stage all the core equipment
for wind farms, such as turbines and blades, is imported from Europe but
all towers are fabricated here. So about 50 per cent of the cost of wind
farms will go to the Australian construction industry. The building industry
also needs to keep an eye on what's going on with solar technology. You
could potentially have a high rise building where a whole wall is a solar
electricity generator. This is currently being tried out on a building
in Melbourne although it will be around five years down the line before
people do it commercially'.
It is largely this area of installing more sophisticated equipment that
will require a 'suite of new technical skills,' according to Reid.
The drivers for investment into these technologies are two-fold at the moment, with the main one being legislation, followed by consumer demand. 'The whole notion of sustainability is driving the entire market - this is a $20 billion a year market in Europe and growing dramatically right now and I suspect to some extent we'll see exactly the same thing happening in Australia,' Reid says. 'You can judge that by the number of people that sign on to green electricity schemes. Between 2-3 per cent of people are prepared to pay a premium for their electricity and that's a legitimate market demand'.
As to where the investment will happen geographically, this is likely to be fairly diverse, Reid says. 'It will pretty much follow the population distribution of Australia. In terms of large scale projects, the East Coast and urban centres of Northern Territory and western Australia will see some construction.' Redding adds: 'Wind power will be all along the southern coast and Tasmania, where the good wind is. Rural biomass will be wherever waste resource is so wherever there's a forestry area, power generation will occur. There's a big resource in Queensland that will come from the waste from processing sugar cane so the 30 or so sugar mills will become biomass generators. Solar will be focused on remote places where there is a lot of sunshine and power is expensive, such as inland Australia and the Northern Territory.'
Renewable energy technologies, particularly biomass, signal a move away from landfill sites. Firms such as EDL are currently generating power from the gas in existing landfills. The next step is to extract energy from the waste before it goes into landfill. 'You reduce the volume of waste by 80 per cent and the remaining 20 per cent is used for soil reconditioning,' director of energy and environmental consultants Sustainable Solutions Alan Pears explains. 'Even the best landfill gas capture systems can only capture less than three quarters of the gas released. The gas that escapes is a potent greenhouse gas, and so makes new landfills look a poor option - we should be aiming to stop building new landfills and turning to these new solutions.'
The use of industrial wastes on site for integrated energy production, rather than paying for waste disposal is also likely to increase, Pears says. 'New buildings will use much less energy - probably a quarter as much as conventional buildings of today. Where industrial facilities generate significant quantities of wastes, increasing waste disposal charges combined with improving renewable energy technologies mean it will become increasingly attractive to process wastes on site to generate energy to avoid buying it'. An example of this is paper firm Bisy, which is building a new pulp and paper mill in Tumut, NSW. The firm is going to use all the waste from the paper processing energy production plant that will provide heat for the plant and also generate power for it.
So what does the future hold for renewable energy technologies? Redding is optimistic that there will be a fundamental shift from coal based energies. 'I definitely believe that, but how long it will take is what we don't know. The big hope is with solar cells. With more research they should be able to figure out how to make them cheaper so we could have a future where we don't have big power stations at all anymore, where instead all the buildings have solar cells on the roof and they are all connected into a grid. So instead of power coming from a central power station into the cities, it will be just generated everywhere from these solar cells.'
Resources
Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Renewable (ACRE)
NSW Sustainable Energy Development Authority
Contractor Construction is the monthly magazine for construction professionals in Australia. This article is the copyright of the publisher, Reed Business Information and appears here with their permission. For more information on the magazine, visit Reed's website at http://www.reedbusiness.com.au
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