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UN Report Shows E-Government Boosts Sustainable Development

The 2016 UN E-Government Survey provides new evidence that e-government has the potential to help support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs).  The Survey finds that e-government is an effective tool for facilitating integrated policies and public service by promoting accountable and transparent institutions through open data and e-participation and participatory decision-making as well as by advancing online services to bridge the digital divides. The Survey found that United Kingdom has pursued continued development on e-government innovation, and its Government Digital Service has been replicated by other countries around the world. Australia and …

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Renewable energy fixing the gaps

Renewable energy – South Australia is in the forefront of Australia’s transition to a low carbon economy. The July 2016 experience in that state has raised questions about the effects of high and increasing proportions of renewable energy, gas policies, and the design of the National Electricity Market. An immediate answer is grid-scale batteries, which are being deployed in other developed countries to balance increasing volumes of wind and solar energy as reported by Ross Garnaut. The Australian government’s participation in the December 2015 Paris agreements implicitly commits us to zero net emissions in electricity by the middle of the …

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Sustainability in Business Speaker Opportunity

Sustainability in Business: The National Sustainability in Business Conference; renewables, markets, innovation, opportunities and capital will be held 23 – 24 March 2017 at the Hotel Grand Chancellor in Brisbane. The Conference will address the need for sustainable business practices, and what this means in today’s ever-changing world. Included will be an extensive range of topics with keynotes, concurrent sessions, forum presentations, case studies, panel discussions and poster presentations. Sustainability in Business Speaker opportunity Presenters or organisations wishing to speak are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words.  All proposals will be reviewed by the program …

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Renewable Energy Entrepreneurs

Renewable Energy Entrepreneurs: Why and how to become an Renewable Energy Entrepreneurs is discussed by Isabele Hernandez. The world as we see it is inflicted with agony. Under the clouds of human-inflicted jeopardies, we often tend to forget what kind of natural disasters await us in the coming years. The rising temperature of the atmosphere, unnatural frequency of earthquakes, mass deformities in child-birth – all of these are signs, signs which tell us something is not working right. Scientists and researchers of various subjects agree that human species are consuming their reserve of fossil-energy way too early. The alternate options …

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Solar cell efficiency race is on

Solar cell efficiency: If you haven’t already heard, the solar cell efficiency race is on, and once you’ve dusted off your periodic table, it’s a race as scintillating as any big-ticket derby. The stakes, however, are much, much higher as reported by Ceridwen Dovey. The scientists who are globally acknowledged to be the best at developing solar cells – tweaking them, goading them to perform better at converting sunlight to electricity – have been quietly doing their work for four decades in a laboratory at the University of New South Wales, just up the road from Sydney’s Royal Randwick Racecourse. It’s here …

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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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Boost to renewable energy target

Renewable Energy: Ross Israel from QIC and Andy Vesey from AGL Energy are the new breed of renewable energy evangelists. They view Australia’s renewable energy target as an opportunity to generate a mainstream discussion about decarbonisation of Australia’s power generation, while at the same time pioneering new methods of financing for large scale solar and wind projects as reported by the Financial Review. Vesey, who is chief executive of AGL, believes Australia is yet to seriously address the fundamental question of how to solve the problem of an oversupplied energy generation market. He takes every opportunity in public forums to …

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Developing reliable renewable energy sources

As the world’s population continues to grow, so does our consumption of natural resources. Many of these resources are non-renewable, so research into renewable sources of energy is vital. Research led by Bournemouth University’s Dr Zulfiqar Khan is tackling this issue through reducing corrosion, improving heat transfer and fluid dynamics, and using nano coatings to enhance surface effiencies in renewable energy systems as reported by Science News. The European Union’s (EU’s) Renewable Energy Directive states that the EU should be producing 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020; a challenging target for any country. Dr Khan’s research is …

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Victoria’s largest wind farm approved

Victoria has approved a new $650 million, 96-turbine wind farm as the state bids to become the nation’s renewable energy leader. But that could be hard to do if nothing is done to phase out coal-fired energy, the Greens say. The wind farm, in Dundonnell in the state’s southwest, will save an estimated 700,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year – equivalent to removing 170,000 cars from Victorian roads. The approval of the project means 300 direct and indirect jobs will be created during construction, and the turbines will generate 1000Gwh of clean energy each year. It’s enough to …

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