Page 2312 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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five-star, they see six-star. They think that that is the only thing that matters. You could often get the case where a big new six-star house in fact uses a lot more energy than a very old one-star house which is tiny.
I am proposing that we have a new number shown on our energy efficiency ratings for houses, just as we do when we buy our appliances. When you buy your appliance, it has got a label. It has got a star rating. Underneath it, it has “expected kilowatt hours for a year’s use”. We could have the same thing: “Expected megajoules used for a year”, which would be simply the product of the star rating—megajoules per square metre—and the square metres in the house. No additional work is required by ACTPLA to do it. It is merely a piece of mass which most people in the community would not have the resources to do or not know how to. This would be simple, cheap, easy and informative to people.
Paragraph (2)(b) proposes to expand the ACT home energy rating scheme to include a rating for fixed heating and cooling appliances, water heating and fixed lighting using a similar methodology to the New South Wales basic system. This is what they have in New South Wales. They include all these things because they make a difference to the energy use of a house. Most people do not really differentiate between the two. We need a rating for the energy for the long-lived appliances. We can do it. Washing machines have ratings for water and energy when you buy them. We can do that for houses. We can have a rating for the energy use of the house itself and we can have a rating for the heating system and the hot-water system. They come with ratings. We can provide them to the consumers.
Next, I want to amend the sale of premises act, which as I said should be 2003, to require, or at the very least permit, the use of second generation software. Software has improved since 1997. There is now what is called second generation software. But the legislation that governs this in the ACT says that you have to use old software. There is no training for that any more. You cannot get new copies of it. We can do better than this. This is one of the issues that we talked about in 2009. It should have been fixed by now. I call upon the government to actually fix this.
Another thing which I call upon the government to do is to improve the coverage of the sale of premises act so that it includes more residential dwellings. At present, basically it only includes normal household, multi-unit or single residences. I can see the point of exemptions on places like caravans or hotels. But there are two which I think should be added in: student apartments and retirement villages. There is no reason why they cannot have a rating attached. They are basically going to be built with the same sort of construction methods as single residences or multi-units, and their residents will want to know what is going on.
In paragraph (2)(e) I am calling on the government and COAG to actually implement the mandatory disclosure of residential building energy, greenhouse and water performance at the time of sale or lease. It has not happened and I note that Mr Rattenbury’s rental bill would be a good way of implementing the lease part of it.
I then ask the government to explore the use of alternative methods for physical audits of energy efficiency ratings, including the use of thermal imaging and air leakage
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