Carbon Status
Hydro Tasmania aims to be Australia’s first carbon neutral generator by 2012. As a hydropower generator we have low operational greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) compared to other generators.
Hydro Tasmania started reporting its carbon footprint in 1997 with the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Challenge Plus program. This helped develop actions to manage emissions from our operations and facilities. In 2005-06, we introduced targets to reduce energy consumption across the business by 36 per cent over five years - see Table 16. This is now captured in our carbon neutral target.
Hydro Tasmania’s target for 2007-08 was to reduce energy consumption across the business by 12 per cent on the base year of 2005-06 from three areas:
- diesel use on the Bass Strait islands
- fuel use in the vehicle fleet
- electricity consumed in buildings and facilities.
Managing our emissions footprint
Our first step to reduce energy use has been to better understand our carbon footprint by implementing improved mechanisms to capture, monitor and report data.
Energy use
The majority of Hydro Tasmania’s emissions come from energy use (including electricity), vehicle fleet and diesel. A small percentage comes from non-energy sources such as sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) used in electrical switchgear, waste and hydrofluorocarbons (HFC) from air-conditioning. For the first time the estimated amount of fuel used by staff on commercial flights has been included in our inventory - see Table 17.
* Targets are based on 2005-06 baseline |
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The total electricity consumption figure has reduced significantly from 108 GWh to 94 GWh over the past three years. There is difficulty attributing this reduction until further analysis is conducted on actual consumption versus methodology changes to data collection and calculations.
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