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Young Energy Professionals: House of 2050
Speaker abstracts and biographies
Chair: Dr Robert Crawford, Future Generation Fellow, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne
Dr Robert Crawford is a Future Generation Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at The University of Melbourne. Robert has broad research expertise and interest in the environmental performance of the built environment, life cycle assessment and renewable energy. His recent experience has focused on sustainable resource use, the environmentally appropriate selection of materials and sustainable building design and feasibility. This work has involved improving life cycle assessment methodologies and performing extensive embodied energy assessments of buildings, their components and renewable energy systems.
Dr Crawford is also a member of the Melbourne Energy Institute Reference and Energy Futures Groups and has recently authored a book titled Life cycle assessment in the built environment to be published in early 2011. The contribution of Robert’s work to the fields of construction and environmental assessment has been demonstrated and acknowledged by various awards. He has also acted as a researcher, consultant and adviser to several State Government departments, research and professional organisation.
The efficient house
The concepts behind building environmentally sustainable homes have been well known for decades, yet Australian homes still perform poorly, especially when compared to homes that are being built in other comparable countries. This presentation explores the possible reasons behind this, including Australia’s access to inexpensive energy, mild climate and a traditionalist industry.
The presentation also examines why Australia needs to radically reform the performance of its homes if it wishes to achieve the greenhouse gas emission targets that have been set by the Australian federal government.
Finally, the Australian Zero Emission House project is introduced which aims to show how low to zero emission homes can be implemented into the mainstream housing market while still remaining affordable and meeting the expectations and aspirations of current home buyers. The project includes a demonstration house which has been constructed in Melbourne and will be tenanted and monitored for one year to confirm the modelling results.
Finally, the Australian Zero Emission House project is introduced which aims to show how low to zero emission homes can be implemented into the mainstream housing market while still remaining affordable and meeting the expectations and aspirations of current home buyers. The project includes a demonstration house which has been constructed in Melbourne and will be tenanted and monitored for one year to confirm themodelling results.
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Michael Ambrose, Group Leader, CSIRO - Urban Sciences
Michael is a group leader within the Urban Systems Program at CSIRO’s division of Ecosystem Sciences. Michael has a degree in architecture and has been with CSIRO, Australia’s leading science research organisation, for 15 years. His research work has focused on sustainability issues related to our urban built environment including modelling the environmental impacts of buildings, energy modelling and life cycle analysis of building materials.He created Your Development, a web-based portal for the delivery of sustainability guidelines for urban developers, planners, utility providers and government departments within Australia and is currently project leader for the Australian Zero Emission House project. The AusZEH project has developed an energy efficient new home designed for the Australian mass housing market that is affordable and producers no greenhouse emissions in operation. The AusZEH project is now investigating ways to improve the existing housing stock to greatly improve their energy efficiency and reduce emissions from the entire residential sector.
Michael has written many peer-reviewed publications, including book chapters, journal articles and refereed conference papers.
The wired house
With this in mind, one needs to temper the science of forecasting, backcasting and trend analysis with the dynamics of wild cards, such as global warming, and even possibilities which we might consider today to be the domain of science fiction, eg. self-evolution and quantum computing.
Notwithstanding these words of caution, this presentation will conjecture a future outlook based on the premise of a smarter world where people, technology and solutions all work towards a smart, sustainable, environmentally aware society.
John Nachef, Business Development Manager, Cisco Systems
John Nachef has been working as a professional engineer in the IT industry for over 25 years. John has undertaken both strategic network planning projects as well as managing large scale infrastructure project roll-outs such as turnkey deployment of intercapital optical DWDM systems across Australia.
John has held several senior General Management positions in a number of companies including Telstra and Alcatel-Lucent and is currently Business Development Manager at Cisco Systems, driving Cisco’s Market Development strategy and industry engagement across Energy Utilities (Smart Grid).
John is the Chairman of the IN Working Group, in Smart Grid Australia, a member of the Board of SMPTE Australia and a member of Engineers Australia.
The communal house
Despite sustainability at the building scale gaining greater acceptance, sustainable precincts or neighbourhoods are still largely non-existent in the Australian context. Victoria’s current building and planning regulatory environment fails to adequately require the consideration of sustainability in urban development, and the development industry appears largely intent on continuing the traditional model of greenfield, low density, car based development. However a greater focus on how communities function, and the impact urban development can have on this, has huge potential in energy, transport, waste and water efficiency, as well as addressing social issues of isolation, access to essential services and support and community resilience. In addition to this, a strong business case is also building for why private developers should take a lead role in this.
This presentation will explore how precinct development can work to address both environmental and social issues, discussing a number of leading European examples as well as local initiatives, and how these may influence the future of urban development in Victoria.
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Peter Steele, Coordinator – Urban Development, Moreland Energy Foundation
Peter joined Moreland Energy Foundation (MEFL) from a background as a Strategic Planner in local government. His role at MEFL focuses on bringing a land use and built environment perspective to the organisation’s various programs and projects. He works closely with various local and state government partners and private sector developers, exploring best practice concepts in sustainable urban development.
A particular focus of Peter’s work is exploring how precinct redevelopment projects such as Moreland City Council’s ‘The Coburg Initiative’ can achieve world leadership in sustainability. To support this work, in late 2009 Peter undertook a European study tour of best practice examples of sustainable precincts.
This tour focused on:
- Planning, design and technological aspects of the developments
- Business and delivery models developed to ensure sustainability features were viably incorporated from design through to ongoing operation
- Distributed energy generation
Peter has a Bachelor of Social Science (Planning) from RMIT University.
