Sustainable Business Blog

Browse the 'Sustainable Business Blog' to discover interesting facts about energy efficiency, principles of sustainability and how to be sustainable in business. Learn why sustainability is important and how to improve energy efficiency in the workplace. Access energy efficiency resources and commercial energy saving tips

Energy Efficiency Strategy – meeting room or plant room?

Energy efficiency strategy which is effective will result in ongoing energy savings. But does this start in the meeting room? Or in the plant room? Being able to identify and quantify energy efficiency opportunities requires good technical knowledge. And technicians may be much more comfortable in the plant room than in the meeting room. But

Read More

All Aboard for Port Sustainability

Port sustainability is not usually something that you think about when it comes to ports. Think of a port and you might think of shipping containers, economic activity, the transfer of goods from sea to land. But there is strong interest from some port authorities in making their ports more sustainable, and in order to

Read More

Circular Economy Reflection – Should Old Air Conditioners be Rebuilt?

The circular economy is one with the idea that when a product fails or is replaced, it can be broken down into its components, and then these components can be processed and stripped back to raw materials, and made into new products. Recycling an air conditioner would involve taking it apart, separating all the different

Read More

Emissions Reduction: The Bright Future of a Commodity Going South

The state of Victoria, in the south east of Australia, is similar to many western nations in that the use of electricity from centralized electricity generators on the grid is on the wane, as illustrated in the graph below, and is a leading cause of emissions reduction. Electricity consumption is down 17% compared with 2008

Read More

Our Parliamentary Witch Doctors of Coal Are the Dangerous Ideologues

Over the last couple of weeks Australia’s coalition government have branded Labor and the Greens as having “an ideological hatred of coal.” According to the Oxford dictionary, the definition of Ideology is “A system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.” Throughout history humankind has

Read More

Do We Need Coal Power Stations for Grid Frequency Control?

Last year’s 1 in 50 year storm in South Australia which knocked out transmission lines and cut power to the state bought a new term to the debate about the reliability of renewable power – “frequency control”. After the loss of the transmission line wind turbines went off line, as they were designed to, one

Read More

Reducing Carbon Emissions vs Turnbull’s Risky Base-Load Coal Bet

Reducing carbon emissions is a scientific imperative, yet yesterday (1 February) Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that Australia needed more synchronous base-load power, and that we would continue to use coal for many decades. He stated that “it is clear that the coalition stands for cheaper energy” and that “we are approaching this issue clear-eyed,

Read More

How to Stop Climate Change and Moisés Naím’s “The End of Power”

“From boardrooms to battlefields and churches, to states, why being in charge isn’t what it used to be.” For those of us who are interested in how to stop climate change this simple sentence provides insights into why it seems such a struggle. The theme of this 2013 book by Moisés Naím is that power

Read More
rooftop PV business
Renewable Energy

What Rooftop Solar Companies Can Do to Survive and Thrive Without Incentives

In some developed economies around the world the solar business is getting tougher, much tougher, as policy support ratchets back. In Australia this has been well underway for 3 years, and the number of rooftop solar installations in 2015 was roughly one third of what it was in 2011. Sure, the average system size has

Read More

Subscribe to our Newsletter



    Scroll to Top
    Scroll to Top