In days of yore, building a sustainable family residence meant spending substantially more than for a regulation dwelling. Yet an engineer and an artist have constructed a positive-energy home at less than the usual cost of construction. Read the full article in Ecolibrium, the official journal of AIRAH.

The content discussed how to go about developing policies that prioritised energy efficiency for building by consulting with key stakeholders. The purpose of the slides is to teach emerging professionals in the emerging economies about how targets and policies can be used in tandem to meet energy and development goals.

Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) are uniquely positioned—and publicly committed—to ending energy poverty. However, MDBs’ common approach to energy access often overlooks the particular ability that decentralized renewable energy (DR energy or DRE) enterprises have to radically alter the access timeline.

The National Construction Code is a ready-made policy instrument to influence the energy efficiency of new buildings and major renovations. Improved building energy efficiency presents a win-win-win solution, reducing stress on the electricity network and supporting a least-cost pathway to decarbonisation while also delivering cost savings and improved comfort to households and businesses.

The construction industry contributes around 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, 40% of depletion of natural resources, and 25% of wastes globally. To reduce these impacts, construction industries can adopt low-carbon alternatives for construction materials and waste minimisation strategies, including the recycling of construction and demolition waste.

China, the world’s largest car market, is working on a timetable to stop the production and sale of vehicles powered by fossil fuels. India has declared its intention to make all new vehicles electric by 2030.
Like Britain and France, these two markets are looking to phase out the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles over the next 20 years or so.

This paper explores the potential for solar thermal cooling to succeed commercially, and more specifically, the application scenarios where this is most likely. This mainly philosophical contribution hopes to highlight directions for future research.

This paper aims to revisit the way that distributed energy resources (DERs) interact with the present structures of the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM), and consider opportunities to improve the interface between centralized and distributed resource operation and investment.

Local electricity sharing schemes have the potential to play an increased role in the Australian National Electricity Market as the penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) continues to grow. These models allow participants to share energy between separately owned and operated DERs, however are largely untested.

In the future there will be an increased uptake of solar and battery systems in the residential sector, driven by falling battery costs and increasing electricity tariffs. The increased uptake means we need new methods to forecast electricity demand when considering these technologies.
This paper has achieved this goal using a two stage model.

There are a number of factors accelerating the uptake of residential battery systems in Australia, these include: falling battery cost, increased energy prices and lower solar export rates. Given the new interest, it is important to analyse the optimal capacities of residential battery systems, for a standard Australian households.

This paper outlines opportunities for, and barriers to, increasing PV deployment on apartment buildings in Australia. With PV penetration reaching 40% of residential dwellings in some parts of the country, access to renewable energy for the 14% of Australians who live in apartments has lagged behind.