The City of Sydney's in-house climate change expert, Allan Jones.

By Angela Dorizas

Councils across New South Wales are closely following the City of Sydney's plan to move towards decentralised power and water.

More than 45 councils gathered at Sydney Town Hall last week to hear from the City of Sydney’s in-house climate change expert, Allan Jones.

Mr Jones briefed both rural and metropolitan councils on the City’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 per cent by 2030 through trigeneration plants, renewable energy, alternative waste treatment, decentralised water systems and automated waste collection.

The forum was organised by the City of Sydney following widespread interest from councils and shires across the state.

Mr Jones said there was growing demand for local action on climate change.

“Local politicians generally are a bit disappointed that Australia hasn’t moved very far forward in this area, so they’re looking to take action but they’re not quite sure what to do,” he told Government News.

“That’s why they’re coming to the City of Sydney. It’s really about dissemination of information and knowledge.”

Councils learnt of the City’s plan for a decentralised water system. This strategy would go beyond rainwater harvesting and grey water recycling on a building by building basis, to create a city wide system capturing all water resources.

“What we’re planning to do is have a city wide system capturing all of the water resources, not just from rainwater and grey water but also sewer mining and recovering water that’s evaporated through air conditioning and cooling towers – the whole raft of water resources out there that are not currently being captured,” Mr Jones said.

There was particular interest in the City’s plan to generate electricity locally through trigeneration plants, which would be three times more energy efficient than coal fired power stations.

“If we generate electricity locally at a smaller scale and we use low carbon fuel like natural gas then we can significantly reduce our emissions,” he said.

“Typically we will get 10 per cent more electricity than we would get from a coal fired power station.”

More importantly, he added, waste heat from energy production would also be recovered for heating and cooling.

“There’s a very, very big reduction in emissions through doing that,” he said.

The City of Sydney has called for tenders for the installation of a network of precinct based trigeneration systems creating a series of low carbon zones. These zones will supply electricity, heating and cooling to council buildings and potentially nearby non-council buildings.

Mr Jones said this required a shift in procurement practices, with the City now determining output performance specifications.

“We actually set our own requirements, which is principally reductions in emissions, so contractors have to guarantee that performance,” he said.

“Rather than try and guess an input requirement that gets you the output you want, we actually specify those outputs.

“In our case, we’re looking to reduce emissions by 70 per cent from trigeneration and 30 percent from renewable energy. We are procuring a range of projects to deliver on that.”

Leichhardt councillor Daniel Kogoy said he was keen to hear more about the City of Sydney’s trigeneration network and its possible extension to inner-west Sydney.

“For surrounding councils on the border with the City of Sydney, it seems like in the future there would be some opportunity to participate in that project,” Cr Kogoy said.

“We would certainly be keen to hear about how we could get involved in that.”

Cr Kogoy said local residents were demanding a shift away from coal fired power.

“From my perspective, there is a fair bit of frustration when governments are delaying action on climate change and paving the way for expansions of existing coal fired power stations,” he said.

“It is certainly not the direction you need to be heading in to take serious action on climate change.”

Decentralised power was also of particular interest to Jenny Bennett, executive officer of CENTROC, representing 17 councils and shires from central western NSW.

“The really interesting thing that Allan Jones said, having been up to Bathurst, was that it would be a lot easier to implement decentralised systems in a rural setting than in a city setting,” Ms Bennett said.

“Any help we can get from the Federal Government would be fantastic, because it is just so hard to resource this.”