Mission Zero: Environmentally friendly businesses in Queensland

From entire sheds built from solar panels, to roads made from recycled glass, businesses, councils, schools and groups across regional Queensland are doing their bit to reduce their carbon footprint.

From schools converting to solar energy, to councils converting recycled products into park benches, businesses and organisations across regional Queensland are doing their bit to go green.

Australian businesses are leading the way in the push towards net zero emissions by 2050, according to Business Council of Australia CEO Jennifer Westacott.

Ms Westacott says the number of Australia’s largest and most successful companies making net zero commitments has more than tripled in the past three years, with around half of the ASX200 companies now committed to rapidly reducing their emissions.

CENTRAL QUEENSLAND

Dobinsons Spring & Suspension in Kawana requires high electricity use, often in strong, short bursts.

Five years ago, owner Glen Dobinson had 2000 solar panels installed to reduce his business’ operating costs and cover roughly 30 per cent of his energy needs at the time.

“Originally our power provider was going to make the tariffs that were on for the last 30, 40 years, they were going to make them obsolete,” Mr Dobinson said.

It was a $1.3 million investment in 2016, and since then his electricity use has increased with the installation of another production line.

GLOBAL AMBITION: GEM Energy's Jack Hooper (left) and Dobinsons Spring and Suspension's Glen Dobinson of with a small part of the solar panel array on top of Dobinsons' roof.

At Biloela, NAB foundation has granted Creche and Kindergarten Association up to $10,000, which will fund 36 solar panels and two inverters for the C & K Biloela Community Childcare Centre.

It is not just solar power that businesses and organisations in Central Queensland are embracing, with Rockhampton Regional Council last year named Queensland’s ‘Tidy Town’ of 2020 for its environmental sustainability and resource management projects.

These included diverting 34,000 tonnes of construction and demolition waste for reprocessing and reuse as concrete, asphalt and topsoil, saving council $5.6 million.

Roads in the Rockhampton region will also increasingly be made from recycled materials.

In 2020, the council teamed up with Boral Australia and undertook a trial to re-seal a local road with an asphalt mix made up of five per cent recycled glass – which equated to about 120,000 glass bottles for the project.

WIDE BAY

Bundaberg’s Shalom College aced its plan to go solar with the official opening of its solar farm, which has a 810KW tracking solar system and Tesla battery power.

GEM Energy CEO Jack Hooper said the system, which was switched on earlier this year, had more than 2000 solar panels and almost enough energy to power an entire suburb.

“The process involved looking at the school‘s energy consumption, considering its growth over the future of what energy saving measures we could take, including LED lighting, and then designing a solar system that will off-set the energy consumption for the whole school, will also generate enough energy to store in a battery,” he said.

“The battery will come in and support the school when the solar was unable to and also cover the overnight consumption.”

Mr Hooper said Shalom and some other Catholic Education schools in the Diocese of Rockhampton were the only ones in Australia that had achieved 100 per cent renewable energy.

“That‘s achieved through offsetting all of its own energy requirements as well as being contracted directly to a wind farm to procure the remaining energy requirements,” he said.

It is not just schools in the Wide Bay region that are reducing their carbon footprint.

Fraser Coast Regional Council is also doing its bit to go green, with plans to build a new Material Recovery Facility that will be operational by the end of 2022, and thousands of homes in the region being powered by methane gas from a landfill site.

The new recovery plant will aim to reduce the level of contaminated product being sent to landfill to between 10 and 15 per cent and give the council the potential to introduce closed loop systems such as turning plastics into park benches or planking, or crushing glass to create sand that can be used in council projects.

Maryborough’s Saltwater Creek landfill site has been generating power from methane gas for four years now, after council partnered with resource recovery contractor LGI.

Under the project, the council provided access to its landfill sites in Maryborough and Hervey Bay and LGI provided the equipment to tap the methane gas and generate the electricity.

Decomposing waste in landfills produce the gas, which is a mixture of about half methane and half carbon dioxide.

MACKAY

When Werner Engineering opened its brand-new Paget workshop in 2013, its operations were plagued with circuit boards burning out and machinery electrical problems.

After 25 years at the former Glenella location, the move brought to light a number of issues with the way the Mackay-based machining and fabrication workshop ran its power.

“It was affecting our operation and delivery timelines as a machine could go down at any time without warning and be very costly in repair and downtime,” managing director Darryl Stark said.

In December 2015, Werner Engineering was approached by Carbon Friendly Enterprises, a local Indigenous-owned and run business operating with a team of renewable engineering and energy specialists.

After some convincing, Werner Engineering took up Carbon Friendly Enterprises’ offer to perform an energy audit and energy efficiency opportunities site assessment.

“The first thing they did was perform a detailed load profiling assessment which revealed several things about our company and the way we operate as well as the underlying ‘harmonic’ and dirty power issues that was causing our high value assets to fail,” Mr Stark said.

“They explained electronic parts do not wear out, they burn out, and this was the cause. “They worked with us to provide a permanent fix using state of the are power management equipment and verifying the results.

“We have gone from a position of high exposure to almost zero breakdown downtime.”

Werner partnered with CFE to introduce and implement an effective energy management plan as part of operations, incorporating energy performance indicators as an integral part of its KPIs.

“(We’re) taking a long-term view and a staged approach, (and) viewing this as an opportunity to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to improving our operation and reducing our Carbon Footprint,” Mr Stark said.

The five-stage plan to ‘go green’ involved the installation of intelligent power conditioning and phase balancing (creating 14 per cent in energy savings), the installation of active harmonic mitigation, upgrading to LED lighting (energy savings of up to 80 per cent), tariff renegotiation (energy savings of 8 per cent), air compressor and air conditioner management (energy savings of 5 per cent), and hot temperature adjustment (energy savings of 1.5 per cent).

“The lighting upgrade translated to an annual reduction of 108,372kWh … an 88 ton (79.8 tonnes) of CO2 reduction from the atmosphere annually,” Mr Stark said.

A 63.3kW solar system was also installed, reducing Werner Engineering’s C02 emissions by 84.9 metric tonnes each year.

The system was upgraded to 82kW in March 2020.

The final stage involved Werner Engineering being registered an accredited Green Power Station.

The move has enabled Werner Engineering to sell excess power generated back into the grid, help them towards its goal of becoming “not only carbon neutral but carbon positive”, sell green power to other businesses and set up a charging station for electric cars.

“Before we started on our ‘Going Green’ journey … our power peak demand was 155.1kW, a daily average usage of 93.8kW. After stage four (it reduced to) a peak demand of 21.9kW and a daily average usage of 6.7kW,” Mr Stark said.

“A combined result … has seen our electricity bill slashed by 75- 80 per cent.

“This new direction for our company and carefully planned energy solution ensures we save on our bottom line … by reducing a major overhead and helping the environment at the same time.”

A Paget business owner offering sustainable business services is proving he can walk the talk with a totally self-powered operation manufacturing clean-energy products for small businesses to mining giants.

Linked Group Services has gone completely off-grid, generating all its own electricity while continuing to manufacture for the region’s mining industry.

Managing director Jason Sharam said the company had saved more than $150,000 since making the full transition to solar power three years ago.

“It’s all about the early adopters, we’re trying to demonstrate the new norms for everybody in regards to energy and manufacturing,” Mr Sharam said.

Linked Group Services managing director Jason Sharam.

“We have energy to burn, more energy than we know what to do with.

“I want people to understand that not only is sustainable energy possible for businesses, it’s profitable.”

The business itself operates in manufacturing clean energy alternatives for residential housing all the way to large-scale mining operations.

One of its biggest projects to date has been creating the 1.45 megawatt solar carport in Townsville in March 2020.

The business also provides solar energy systems to nationwide businesses including Orange’s airport and Canberra Zoo.

While the EC0G3N is run primarily from solar energy, its hybrid system does offer a diesel backup for when there hasn’t been enough sunlight.

But Mr Sharam said the company was working on converting to hydrogen-based alternatives in the near future.

He said while there had been some positive progress towards sustainability in Queensland, the “whole mindset” regarding business and clean energy needed changing, particularly in large-scale operations.

“The mining sector and the clean energy sector need to work together, they cannot operate in the future without each other.”