Net Zero Carbon Residential Buildings & Communities

Recently I was invited to speak and join a panel discussion our work in the microgrid embedded network space bythe Net Zero Network (NZN) at the UWA E-Zone sustainable engineering building.

The panel included Kieth Hutchings, Matt Wallwork, Melinda Marshall & myself.

Kieth gave an inspiring and passionate introduction in the only style that Kieth knows, bold, funny and colourful with the Hawaiian shirt to boot. He discussed why housing is an important part of the solution to climate change and gave some real-life case studies on indoor environment quality from some solar passive houses that he had visited and interviewed the owners of.

Matt Wallwork spoke about one of the things I find most often forgotten nowadays, energy efficiency in buildings.

He outlined two mainstream methodologies including:

- solar passive design

- Passive House Design & Rating system

The key takeaways from matt's speech are that Passive House us scientific and proven results. Both solar passive and passive House principles work together. All sustainability is good!

The full video of the panel discussion and interractive round table afterwards is available below.

Michelle touched on her role as an urban planner and her other role in co-operative housing communities and their role in reducing climate change.

Expanding on the role of town planning has in climate change, Michelle explained that solar passive was already integrated into the National Construction Code (NCC) for buildings and for suburbs and communities at the Western Planning Commission (WAPC) level.

I briefly discussed the energy transition and the role that solar power now and microgrids will play in the distributed energy resource (DER) future of Australia and the world. Coal is already out, shortly followed by gas to be replaced by DER as we achieve 100% electric buildings, 100% electric transportation, lower cost utilities and 100% 24/7 renewable energy grids.

All strata title lots have the right to aggregate their electricity consumption and benefit from Element47's solutions which include Power Purchase Agreement's (PPA's) and other offerings which provide ultrafast fibre internet connection, energy efficient building services including heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) using heat recovery ventilation systems, heat pumps for domestic hot water, solar, batteries and an EV charger

The transition is here! Check out the video.