BREAZE Newsletter - August 2024
Home Energy Efficiency Workshops
How to stay warm and save on energy bills
Most householders are amazed to learn about the heat loss in their homes – windows and doors (25%), roofs (25%), walls (35%) and floors (15%) – requiring constant re-heating to keep warm. Aiming to help locals stressed by rising energy prices, BREAZE Inc. and a group of local organisations – Ballarat Zero Emissions Alliance (BZEA) – have banded together to run workshops to help Ballarat residents stop the heat loss. Home Energy Efficiency workshops will be running for four Wednesdays by Zoom and for four Sundays face-to-face at local neighbourhood centres in Ballarat East, Wendouree and Sebastopol from 11 August to 4 September. Led by Dale Boucher an accredited Victorian Energy Scorecard Assessor, the workshops offer locals free professional advice – how to get a better deal from energy retailers, cheap DIY fixes to stop draughts, the ins and outs of insulation and how to prioritise those bigger purchases to get off gas. There will also be one Zoom workshop for Property Rental Managers – Wednesday 4 September 3:30-5pm –whose clients, both renters and landlords, likely have need for advice on such matters.
The workshops are part of a City Partnership Program grant to BREAZE Inc, a founding member of the Ballarat Zero Emissions Alliance (BZEA) which aims to help drive Ballarat’s community wide Net Zero Emissions 2030 Plan.
Workshop content will cover: how to read your electricity bill, easy DIY fixes to improve thermal efficiency; how to use a thermal imaging camera to detect draughts (these cameras are available for loan from Ballarat Central Library and the Ballarat Tool Library); everything you need to know about insulation and new energy efficient appliances, along with government subsidies and rebates.
Places are limited, so please book early using the above links.
Volunteer with BREAZE and help drive the Ballarat Zero Emissions (BZE) 2030 Plan
The BREAZE Inc. City Partnership Program grant is enabling us to run three related project strands: the BZE Awards - cross sector civic awards for those who are actively implementing the BZE Plan; Home Energy Efficiency workshops, empowering householders to improve the thermal envelop of their homes; and Going All Electric, helping householders keen to get off gas. If you have some spare time and would like to help us drive that Ballarat Net Zero Emissions 2030 target please get in touch. You can see a little of what we do in this video.
We’re recruiting! Community Project Coordinator
BREAZE is looking for a Community Project Coordinator - this is a paid contractor position for 1.5 days per week. Applications close August 26.
Have a passion for sustainable living and cutting GHG emissions? Looking for a satisfying part time job where you can work from home? Want to make a difference? If you have a flair for community networking, project/event coordination, marketing and communications, plus competence across diverse media platforms, check out this position with BREAZE.
To see more about what we do click here.
Green Drinks
July’s Green Drinks
Tom Quinn, former head of Policy & Research at Beyond Zero Emissions talked about his work in persuading the Albanese government to drive investment in renewables on a scale similar to the US Inflation Reduction Act.
See upcoming events (below) for details of this month’s Green Drinks discussion.
Smart Living Ballarat
July’s SLB - Free Ways to Stay Warm
Ellen Burns returned to run a popular session on staying warm over winter for zero cost. With the growing cost of living, this session is a must. Check out the video recording on our Facebook page.
In the news….
Big gas project losing support
Woodside's $30 billion Browse Joint Venture gas project over the northwest coast might not go ahead thanks to concerns raised by the EPA of WA about a series of environmental impacts. The International Energy Agency — to which Australia is a member — has recommended that no new oil or gas projects be developed if the world is to meet net zero emissions by 2050 and limit the average global temperature increase. Read more in ABC News here.
Upcoming BREAZE events….
Green Drinks
This month (15 August @ 6:30pm Bunch of Grapes Hotel, 401 Pleasant St) a local energy expert and certified energy assessor, Dale Boucher, will outline the key steps in making the transition to an all-electric home, getting off gas and helping the planet. Whether you have made little or lots of energy efficiency improvements, there will be something for you to take home from Dale’s presentation.
Smart Living Ballarat
Join us for a tour of the sustainability project, ReCranked, next to Wendouree Neighbourhood House. ReCranked is a Y Ballarat initiative specialising in giving unwanted bikes new riders. They take old, unwanted, unused, broken or forgotten bikes and revamp them into safe and serious modes of transport for those without wheels.
Opinion piece
How green are the games?
As we tune in with over a billion spectators, cheer on the Aussies in Paris and find ourselves bleary-eyed with the overnight excitement, I wondered how green are the Games? While there are many impacts associated with the Olympics — such as waste and contaminating substances — I’ll stick to BREAZE’s business of emissions here. The last two summer Olympic games were held in Tokyo, Japan and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They released more than 2.7 million and 4.5 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere respectively. Transport is a significant source of those emissions — over a third of the carbon budget. For example, the MIT Technology Review stated 160,000 tons of carbon dioxide were emitted for spectators’ and judges’ travel during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, which was one of the most impactful games along with Rio de Janeiro.
While emissions are still an issue, the good news is that the Olympic committee managed to halve the carbon budget to 1.58 million tons of CO2 in Paris. This was a correction from the original intent of making the games ‘carbon-positive’. Shifting from a post-games to a pre-games assessment is a game-changer in some respects by building transparency in the method and results, and adopting the ARO approach (Avoid, Reduce, Offset). The effect of this resists jumping to compensation (using offsets) without making the first and more complicated step of creating no emissions. Applying this method also brings greater accountability and planning for permanent public assets.
Could the games go greener? Absolutely. An article published in Nature Sustainability in 2021 recommended three steps. The first step would be to greatly downsize the event, which inherently decreases the ecological and material footprint by reducing the size and cost of the new infrastructure required. It would also reduce emissions from transport, which is a big contributor. The second step would be to rotate the Olympics among the same cities. This would reuse the fit-for-purpose infrastructure that is already in place, and the efficiencies of pre-planned routes and facilities would reduce the significant financial costs and social disruption that come with the games. The third step suggested is to enforce strong accountability and transparency standards and use only renewable energy during the event.
Given the carbon impact of personally attending the Paris 2024 Olympics, it is one of the few occasions where we can feel good about being armchair spectators!
Pete Morison (Secretary)