Below are transcript excerpts from a recent Australian television documentary on home energy use and efficiency (ABC TV 25 June). The program is purportedly available as video on demand.
The program is of greater than usual interest for its repeated discovery of the consequences of industry-friendly policy, with building standards, appliance ratings, lighting, and subsidies for solar hotwater vs. PV all getting a look. Throw in a suppressed report and a drowning Federal Minister and its even entertaining, as black comedies go.
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JONATHAN HOLMES: .. Three years ago, the Victorian Government mandated that all new houses should be built to a five-star standard of thermal efficiency so they use less energy to keep them warm in winter and cool in summer.
For the average new house, it’s hardly meant a revolution in building practises.
Reaching the five-star standard is mainly a matter of better insulation, in walls as well as ceilings. And there are fewer large windows.
This 350 square metre house will cost $220,000 but only a negligible amount of that price, says Henley Homes’s Peter Hayes, is attributable to the five-star requirements.
PETER HAYES, MD, HENLEY PROPERTIES: It does depend what home you’re building. If you’re building a traditional home on a concrete slab, brick and tile roof, we think the cost is negligible. I mean these homes cost us about $1000 more, up from two-and-a-half to five-star when we design to make it a five-star home.
JONATHAN HOLMES (to Peter Hayes): But the vast majority of houses built in Australia are …
PETER HAYES, MD, HENLEY PROPERTIES: Eighty to 90 per cent I’d suggest.
JOHN THWAITES, MINISTER FOR ENVIRONMENT, VICTORIA: Our studies show that the cost of five-star, the additional cost on a new home is very minimal, around $1500. But the returns to households are considerable.
JONATHAN HOLMES: It’s far cheaper to make a house thermally efficient when it’s being built than to fix it later.
The Australian Building Codes Board has representatives from state and federal governments and industry. In 2005, it considered following Victoria’s lead by raising the minimum standard in the Building Code of Australia from three-and-a-half stars to five.
According to Alan Pears, who’s a member of its expert steering committee, the Board thought it was doing what the Government wanted.
ALAN PEARS, ENERGY EFFICIENCY CONSULTANT: The Prime Minister in 1997 in his pre-Kyoto announcement said he would give the building industry 12 months to make progress on voluntary improvement
JOHN HOWARD, PRIME MINISTER (speaking in Parliament, 20 November 1997): If this voluntary approach does not achieve acceptable progress within 12 months, we will work to implement mandatory standards.
ALAN PEARS, ENERGY EFFICIENCY CONSULTANT: That was the genesis of the whole thing.
JONATHAN HOLMES (to Alan Pears): But that was some eight years earlier.
ALAN PEARS, ENERGY EFFICIENCY CONSULTANT: Well Governments have not made this a priority area, have they?
JONATHAN HOLMES: But the Building Codes Board ran into ferocious opposition from some powerful lobby groups, notably the Housing Industry Association which represents 45,000 builders and contractors across Australia, most of them small businesses.
The HIA claimed then, and still claims today, that the five-star standard significantly increases the price of the average new home.
GRAHAM WOLFE, HOUSING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION: It certainly did add in excess of $15,000 to the price of a house as it existed back about four or five years ago, yeah.
JONATHAN HOLMES (to Caroline Pidcock): What was the Board’s reaction to that claim?
CAROLINE PIDCOCK, ARCHITECT: Show us the evidence. They couldn’t. They had been alleging that for so long and, you know, show us the money, show us the evidence, where is it? It didn’t come forward, they couldn’t do it.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Sydney architect Caroline Pidcock specialises in renovations and new houses that minimise the need for artificial heating and cooling.
CAROLINE PIDCOCK, ARCHITECT (showing JONATHAN Holmes around a house under renovation): And then we come to this room which is a separate sitting room. We’ve got high level windows to let sunlight in.
JONATHAN HOLMES: She’s the architecture representative on the Building Codes Board and voted for the new five-star code in the teeth of the HIA’s opposition.
CAROLINE PIDCOCK, ARCHITECT: The Housing Industry Association I think has not provided good leadership for its members in this area because I think that Australia has got to stop thinking about, oh my god, isn’t this hard and isn’t this tough. Go and look at what’s happening in Germany and Scandinavia. I mean I’ve got architects working in my office from those places. They can’t believe what we’re allowed to get away with here.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In fact, a team from RMIT University has looked – not at wintry Scandinavia, but at places like San Francisco Bay in California where the climate is similar to Melbourne’s.
Not only here but in Britain and Canada too, they reported to the Federal Government, typical new houses achieved far more than five stars on Australia’s thermal efficiency scale.
DR RALPH HORNE, CENTRE FOR DESIGN, RMIT: We found a fairly consistent picture actually. We found that the average was just under seven stars across those 51 houses, so about 6.9 stars.
JONATHAN HOLMES (to Dr Ralph Horne): California had a particularly high rating, didn’t it, in this comparison?
DR RALPH HORNE, CENTRE FOR DESIGN, RMIT: In the bay area we were looking at seven-and-a-half-stars plus as an average.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In the past 30 years, in California and Australia, houses have got bigger, electronic appliances mushroomed. Australian household electricity consumption per head of population has more than doubled in that time. California’s has grown by just 20 per cent.
California’s state legislators say that’s due to the tough standards they’ve imposed and keep on imposing.
LOYD E LEVINE, CALIFORNIA STATE ASSEMBLY: We lead the country in energy efficiency. We have insulation requirements in California, but we don’t just put them in, we continually update them, so each year or each couple of years our standards are revised so the insulation today is better than it was five years ago. The insulation five years ago is better than it was five years before that. So it keeps improving.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Complaints from the building industry are all too familiar to Assemblyman Lloyd Levine.
LOYD E LEVINE, CALIFORNIA STATE ASSEMBLY: We hear the same thing every time we try and do something. Oh my god, it’s going to be the end the industry as we know it. You know people won’t be able to afford to buy a house, and all sorts of things.
We always come across opposition every time we try and do something, but we don’t throw up our hands and quit, we just keep pushing ahead.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In Australia, the Federal Government’s attitude was rather different.
For a start, the RMIT report that showed Australia’s building code lagging behind comparable overseas countries has never been publicly released. ..
..A month ago Deborah Johnston put a new kitchen into her big house just south of Coogee, in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. She thought she was doing the right thing.
RYAN MCCARTHY, AUDITOR, RANDWICK COUNCIL (to Deborah Johnston in her kitchen): Looks like you’ve got quite a few halogen downlights here …
JONATHAN HOLMES: Until she volunteered for an energy audit offered by Randwick Council.
DEBORAH JOHNSTON (to Ryan McCarthy): I put the halogen lights in thinking they were actually energy efficient. I didn’t do a lot of research.
RYAN MCCARTHY, AUDITOR, RANDWICK COUNCIL (to Deborah Johnston): Yeah. They call them low voltage which often tricks people.
JONATHAN HOLMES: According to energy expert Alan Pears, tens of thousands of Australians make the same mistake as Deborah Johnston. They think low voltage means low energy use and no one’s told them otherwise.
ALAN PEARS, ENERGY EFFICIENCY CONSULTANT: Well, that’s a big fallacy. It’s not the voltage that counts at all; it’s the watts and so one of these halogens is 50 watts and hidden up in your ceiling this kilogram of steel and copper is using another 12 watts or so. So overall your halogen light, your low voltage halogen light is using 60 watts or more of electricity.
JONATHAN HOLMES (to Alan Pears): And of course you tend to have it a lot more of them than you might the old fashioned lights.
ALAN PEARS, ENERGY EFFICIENCY CONSULTANT: Absolutely. Because the halogen lamp has a very narrow beam you end up with a dozen of them in your room instead of maybe three ordinary light globes.
And we’re now seeing a lot of households paying you know, three, four, $500 a year for their lighting bills, when traditionally they were paying $100 or less.
JONATHAN HOLMES: For now, at least, there isn’t a simple energy efficient substitute. There are ultra-compact fluorescent downlights but they don’t work on dimmers and you’ll need an electrician to make the switch.
JONATHAN HOLMES (to Alan Pears): Alan, do you think that governments have been caught on the hop by this halogen craze? I mean should they have stopped it before it really got started?
ALAN PEARS, ENERGY EFFICIENCY CONSULTANT: Well, I think that the thing that governments could have done was simply inform people 10 years ago that low voltage didn’t mean low energy. ..
JONATHAN HOLMES: Solar hot water is the poor relation of the solar industry. These may look like the photovoltaic panels that generate electricity, but because they just use the sun’s rays to heat water, they’re substantially cheaper.
A modest one kilowatt array of solar photovoltaic panels will cost the taxpayer and the householder together about $14,000 to save perhaps a tonne and a half of greenhouse gas emissions per year.
Replacing an electric storage heater with a solar hot water system can save twice as much greenhouse gas for less than half the total cost.
JACQUI STURMANN: Two-thousand-seven-hundred.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Right so you got some rebates in there?
JACQUI STURMANN: Yes you can get rebates and I just thought it was a very good deal. I mean I would have put in a large tank which would’ve cost probably close to the 2,000 mark anyway,
JONATHAN HOLMES: But for people whose electric water heater is still working fine, there’s a substantial up-front cost to make the change.
While solar electricity now gets a federal rebate of $8,000, solar hot water attracts only $800. ..
Most white goods on sale have to carry energy-efficiency labels. And there’s a mandatory Minimum Energy Performance Standard, or MEPS, which keeps out the least efficient appliances altogether.
According to Alan Pears, who’s been advising Australian governments since the 1980’s, those programs have been dramatically effective – especially for the biggest energy user in the house, the family fridge.
ALAN PEARS, ENERGY EFFICIENCY CONSULTANT (referring to fridge for sale): There is a trend towards larger size but even taking that into account we’re saving 60 to 70 per cent and in fact, if you look at a large fridge like this that’s using 872, in the mid, early mid 80s a fridge like this would have been using 2000 kilowatt hours so you’ve still made a significant reduction even though you’ve gone to a bigger fridge.
JONATHAN HOLMES: But there are new power-guzzlers on the market now. Even when they’re on stand-by, electronic appliances can now suck up around 10 per cent of a household’s power. When they’re switched on of course, they use even more.
ALAN PEARS, ENERGY EFFICIENCY CONSULTANT (referring to televisions for sale): These large screen TVs can now use more power for a family than a large family fridge, but we know nothing about how much they’re using to run. The customer has no information.
JONATHAN HOLMES (to Alan Pears): So why is there no star labelling for them, or why …?
ALAN PEARS, ENERGY EFFICIENCY CONSULTANT: Well, it’s about lack of Government commitment to labelling. We’re still labelling the products that used lots of energy in the 80s and 90s. We have not expanded the labelling programme into the things that use lots of energy in the 2000s. ..
