Geographies of energy transition: the case of high-performing commercial office space in the central business districts of Sydney and Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT

As a signatory to the Paris Climate Agreement, Australia committed to reduce emissions significantly by 2030. In a country highly urbanised and dependent on fossil fuels as its primary energy source, one key avenue for meeting these commitments is energy transition in the built environment. Australia has emerged as a leader in the design and construction of high-performance buildings in the premium commercial office sector. In this paper, we address a significant gap in understanding the diverse mechanisms through which building energy transition is being constituted in this sector, focusing on Sydney and Melbourne. In the absence of substantive publicly available data, we draw on mixed methods comprising a database developed around high-performing CBD office buildings and qualitative interviews with a range of sectoral stakeholders. We characterise the building stock in each city, and document five trends constituting energy transitions. We demonstrate that building energy transitions are not only shaped purposefully by dominant governance regimes but also by opportunistic responses to specific material and commercial conditions and legacies in each city. Thus the urban built environment affords significant opportunity for energy transitions, but pathways towards such transitions are necessarily multiple and ultimately shaped by material as well as institutional geographies.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban energy transitions
• built environment
• commercial office buildings
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Chantel Carr http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1541-2409

Notes

1 The agreed target was to reduce emissions by 26–28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 (Dept. of Environment and Energy 2015).

2 The NEM is a highly obdurate assemblage of regulated energy markets comprising generators and retailers, and a physical transmission and distribution grid that extends to all east coast states as well as South Australia.

3 We note here that mid-tier buildings outnumber premium and A-grade buildings in the Australian office building stock and hold substantial opportunities for targeting energy performance (ASBEC 2017). This part of the sector brings its own challenges, including highly fragmented ownership profiles that create specific barriers to energy transitions.

4 Chilled beam systems deliver space cooling by passing piped water through a beam suspended from the ceiling of a room. As the air is cooled it falls to the floor, while warmer air rises to be cooled, creating a convection flow.

5 At least one of these two projects may have installed alternative generation as a demonstration project because the building is occupied by the Environmental Protection Agency.

6 Clearly, though, there is socio-technical complexity to be negotiated at the intersection of the sector’s response to the business imperative for energy efficiency and the imperative of addressing mandated energy performance standards. This will be an ongoing negotiation as energy efficiency and generation technologies evolve.

Additional information

Funding

Australian Research Council [DP 150100991].