The Green Airport

Canberra Airport’s relatively small size and its stage of development have both facilitated an innovative approach to the incorporation of eco-friendly technologies in a short time frame.

The largest and most obvious element is the tri-generation power plant which employs gas as a single source of fuel to produce three different forms of energy, providing efficiencies in the 90 per cent range (compared to around 33 per cent for a typical coal-fired operation). The plant produces electricity to operate the base building, hot water for heating and chilled water for air conditioning.

There will be another tri-generation plant installed in the new terminal building; and when that is in operation, Canberra Airport’s carbon dioxide emissions will have been cut by 75 per cent.

Then there’s the principle and practice of adaptive re-use, whereby the older buildings are modified for new uses rather than being demolished. To date airport management has successfully adapted 11 such buildings.

Alongside that is the wholesale recycling of construction materials, rather than seeing them go to waste. For example, in the construction of the airport’s 5 Green Star office building, more than 80 per cent of the materials were recycled, including more than 90 per cent of the steel and all of the timber.

In water usage terms, the airport now has the ACT’s largest non-potable water storage unit, with on-site tanks capturing up to 1.38 million litres from roofs and making it available for irrigation, toilet flushing and fire fighting. The new terminal building will incorporate another 1.3 million litres of storage.

Additionally there’s a black water treatment plant that recycles sewage to provide water for irrigation and toilet flushing.

In the bathroom facilities themselves, reduced-flow showerheads have halved the water consumed, while infrared taps are saving up to 65 per cent and dual-flush toilets are saving up to eight litres per flush.

In newer buildings, clever use of natural light has reduced the demand for artificial lighting; and where lighting is required it takes the form of T5 technology which uses half the energy of the traditional fluorescent tubes.

Airport CEO Stephen Byron says that, since privatisation, the quality of building that has been undertaken on the airport has been of a very high standard anyway, but the release of the Green Agenda in 2004 provided focus.

“We knew that we wanted to be a part of that, that in fact we wanted to show leadership in that area. Then came the opportunity to build a team of people within our own staff and with the consultants and the construction team that would really bring in some new concepts and technologies.

“In the early days we quite often got a lot of ’you can’t do that, it must be like this’. But once we started achieving a few wins, there became a sense of belief that these otherwise intractible problems could be resolved in different ways and you could find different materials etc. And there was also the desire and support of the management team who were willing to invest the money to get it right and to cross new barriers.

“Then of course there was the need to reduce carbon emissions and as we looked at designing our new terminal we decided that we wanted to ensure that it would be one of the greenest terminals in the world. And by incorporating the trigeneration technology we were able to develop a building that emits 55 per cent less carbon dioxide than even a five-star-rated commercial building.

“When you compare to the Government’s agenda of either reducing five per cent over the next 20 years or reducing 60 per cent within 50 years, we are doing considerably better than the high-water mark – and we are doing it now.

“There is more capital cost, but you do make some operational savings which offset some but not all of the additional capital cost.”

That additional capital cost is in the order of 15 per cent, but the operator gets back about half of that in those operational savings over the 15 to 25 year life of the building.

The green project is on-going: “We are always looking for new ways we can improve things, whether it’s energy or water there is always new technology coming that provides the opportunities to enbrace enhancements.

“The new terminal building provide opportunities to look more holistically in terms of ground power for GSE and the requirements of new aircraft, such as air conditioning,” Byron says. “We will extend the tri-generated power from the terminal building to the aerobridges and the aircraft themselves. And that’s a significant move forward as well.”

There are two tri-generation plants to go into the new terminal, which will take the total employed by Canberra Airport to four.