Home Posts tagged "Sustainability" (Page 14)

Tag Archives: Sustainability

Sustainability is the reason Ikea are selling bikes

Curtin University food and agribusiness marketing professor Peter J Batt said the likes of Nestle, Kelloggs and Heineken were making dramatic changes within the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative. “Sustainability is becoming mainstream,” Batt told HuffPost Australia. “Big multinationals are involved in the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative to say to their suppliers ‘I’ll only take your product if you can show me it’s farmed sustainably’.” Batt said this meant changes to farming methods, supply chains and attitudes to ethical issues. “There’s a saying that it’s hard to be green when you’re in the red,” Batt said. “Increasingly businesses are finding ways to be …

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Renewable energy fund: QIC, Future Fund back AGL

Renewable energy fund: Queensland Investment Corporation and the Future Fund are set to become major players in the race to meet the renewable energy target, backing a $2 billion-$3bn fund with diversified energy group AGL that will build up to a fifth of the new capacity needed. QIC and the Future Fund will tip $800 million into a fund that plans to build 1000MW of new wind and solar farms along the east coast in a deal that breaks a long-running deadlock between investors and energy retailers. AGL chief executive Andy Vesey said the fund, to be announced today, will …

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SA Liberals pushing for all new wind farms to be assessed for their impact on the electricity market

All new wind farm projects would have to undergo an assessment to see how they would affect the electricity market before being approved, if changes proposed by the Opposition were adopted as reported by Lauren Novak. The move comes in response to concerns raised last week after major employers warned the State Government they were considering shutdowns because of wild fluctuations in energy prices. The instability was blamed in part on wild storms, demand interstate and delays in upgrading an interconnector with Victoria. Opposition Leader Steven Marshall added that South Australia’s “massive abundance” of renewable energy, such as wind and …

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Building the ‘New Economy’ With Sustainable Social Enterprise

There is a critical need for more diversity in business, and social enterprise could be the answer, writes Alan Greig, from the Social Enterprise Legal Models Working Group. Sustainable social enterprise can go a long way towards introducing the kind of “values” into capitalism that Kevin Rudd once made reference to in 2009 – “the values of equity, sustainability and community”. With the range of “values based” enterprises that are rapidly developing – many of them profiled in Pro Bono Australia News – social enterprise is already setting the pace in this direction. Social enterprise is changing the way we …

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A shift towards clean energy; Victoria’s renewables target

The Victorian Labor government has announced an “ambitious and achievable” Victorian Renewable Energy Target (VRET). This target will commit the state to generating 25% of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020, and 40% by 2025 as reported by Dylan McConnell. While details of the VRET are yet to be fully fleshed out, it is set to be based on a similar mechanism to the scheme used in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), which has managed to sidestep the uncertainty that has plagued the renewables industry in recent years. ACT deputy chief minister Simon Corbell called Victoria’s announcement “a game-changer”. …

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Hybrid nanogenerator harvests hard-to-reach ocean energy

(Phys.org)—Energy from the ocean, or “blue energy,” is arguably the most underexploited power source, according to researchers in a new study. Although the oceans contain enough energy to meet all of the world’s energy needs, currently there is no effective way to harvest it economically and with reasonable efficiency. The main problem is that ocean waves are irregular and pass by at low frequencies, whereas most energy harvesters operate best with waves that have regular amplitudes and high frequencies. Unfortunately, the calming lull of slow, unpredictable waves beating against the shore that we tend to find so peaceful is not …

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Coal won’t solve energy poverty, but renewables will

Last month, a remarkable story emerged out of Kenya. Not one of violence or unrest that the world is becoming used to, but a lighter one: the national power grid was disrupted by a solitary monkey. The unfortunate primate’s precarious exploration of Kenya’s most important electrical source — a hydro power plant operated by the Kenya Electricity Generating Company — resulted in it falling onto a transformer, short circuiting the nation’s power grid, and causing widespread blackouts and disruption in the process as reported by The HP. While the episode exposed the vulnerabilities of Kenya’s national power gird, it also …

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Energy crowdfunding: the new way to boost renewables

Millions of euros have been crowdfunded in four years to finance small and medium renewable energy projects. And there is still potential to be developed It’s a brand new sector: the first steps date back to 2012. Today energy crowdfunding is a way of financing solar panel or wind turbine projects. For some people, like Andrew Yakub, founder of a US solar manufacturing company, it will save the planet. There is already a big annual conference dedicated to the sector, and a European association that brings together the platforms involved in renewable energy. In March 2016, when one of the …

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IoT enabling a sustainable food industry

A consortium consisting of food value chain companies, researchers, government and regulatory agencies and technology providers is hoping to use the Internet of Things and other innovative technologies to improve food supply sustainability and profitability. Dubbed the Food Agility Cooperative Research Centre (Food Agility CRC), its mission is to “tackle real food industry problems working with innovative digital technology and talented people to make a difference.” The group has recognised that digital technology is the key to improving food industry outcomes, and will focus on and create projects based on four key tenets: Helping Australia’s food producers provide the right …

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Lithium stocks boom in Australia’s clean technology sector

The boom in lithium stocks is overshadowing a broader recovery in the Australian clean technology sector as investor interest in renewable energies builds. Several lithium explorers and emerging producers have soared this year amid expectations of rising demand for lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles. Energy-storage technology has become the latest hot sector in renewable energy and sparked renewed interest in global cleantech companies. After years of heavy losses, Australian cleantech stocks are collectively delivering strong returns and outperforming the sharemarket – a remarkable turnaround for a sector that has had many false starts and been battered by regulatory uncertainty. The Australian CleanTech …

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