Sydney City Council last night endorsed a plan to further investigate the installation of a local, low carbon trigeneration plant in Sydney Town Hall, its offices and indoor pools.
The plant would produce clean, local power, heating and cooling for Sydney Town Hall and the neighbouring Town Hall House where over 1,500 City of Sydney employees work. It would provide energy for hundreds of lights, printers and computers as well as air conditioning and charge the city's electric vehicle fleet.
Trigeneration also works well in indoor pools as they require heating, electricity and cooling. A number of other NSW councils have already completed pool cogeneration/trigeneration projects including Willoughby, Wagga Wagga, North Sydney and Leichhardt.
Lord Mayor Clover Moore said the City had a long-term commitment to reduce carbon pollution and locally-produced energy would make a big contribution to the City’s emissions reduction target of 70 per cent by 2030.
“At the City, we know most of our residents want action on climate change and so we’ve reduced our emissions by 20 per cent since 2006 and projects are underway to achieve 29 per cent in coming years,” the Lord Mayor said.
“We’ve made the simple and obvious changes but to meet our target of reducing emissions by 70 per cent we need to change the way we power our city. That means shifting away from coal-fired power and investing more in clean and local energy.
“Cities use over two thirds of the world’s energy and emit more than 70 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions, so its action in cities that provides us with the greatest opportunity for deep cuts.”
Trigeneration is more than twice as efficient as coal-fired power stations that produce around 80 per cent of Sydney’s electricity.
The cost of carbon abatement per tonne using trigeneration at Town Hall can be comparable with Greenpower while providing infrastructure which improves building energy efficiency.
Trigeneration plants use natural or renewable gases to produce electricity. The heat by-product from the process that is wasted at centralised power stations is captured and used for air conditioning, heating and hot water services - making the facilities more than twice as efficient as coal-fired power plants.
A trigeneration plant on the roof of Town Hall House would help achieve a five per cent reduction in the City’s carbon pollution, and avoid about 74,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime.
Similar plants already exist in many office buildings across Sydney, but to make more efficient use of them the City is calling on the NSW and Federal Government to cut red tape to support precinct-based trigeneration.
Regulatory barriers and costly electricity network charges that do not reflect the benefits local generation offer the network make it difficult to install bigger, more efficient plants that can supply multiple buildings and deliver even bigger savings.
Installing trigeneration at Town Hall House would allow for future expansion to the neighbouring Queen Victoria Building, and potentially other buildings in the area.
