Whale rescuers say there have been 24 entanglements already this migration season. Meanwhile, a small whale was euthanised after it stranded itself on a beach near Newcastle, despite rescue efforts from residents and experts.
Australian households are under immense financial pressure – and rising energy costs are a major reason why.
While policy makers and system planners have focused on ways to produce more energy – such as increasing renewables like solar – they’ve paid less attention to strategies to encourage people to save power.
House insulation – or large squares of bulky materials such as polystyrene and wool that are installed in roof cavities or walls – is one of the most practical ways to curb energy demand.
Insulation acts like a giant blanket for your home, ensuring it retains heat in winter and stays cool in summer. It also helps lower energy demand on the grid at peak times, making it cheaper to integrate renewable energy into the broader network.
However, Australia’s insulation standards have long lagged behind other countries.
Insulation limits the transfer of heat between the inside and outside of your house. This process works in both directions, ensuring homes retain warmth in winter and block out heat in summer.
Insulation also reduces the need for heaters and cooling systems, which make up a large share of energy bills. This may also reduce your exposure to harmful gases – such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde – that gas heaters may release in large amounts.
Read more: How to heat your house efficiently
Insulation is an efficient way to reduce energy use, both on a household and network level.
Well-insulated homes use less energy overall. This is because insulation ensures houses stay at a comfortable temperature long after appliances are switched off.
Insulation also helps prevent spikes at peak demand times. These include evenings when many people prepare dinner after coming home from work or school, or hot summer afternoons when people rely on cooling systems.
Households with effective insulation can also install smaller air-conditioner units and batteries. This brings down energy costs, while making it more affordable to switch to electrical appliances.
Read more: Why bad housing design pumps up power prices for everyone
On a societal level, improving insulation in walls, floors and ceilings is one of the most effective ways to reduce peak energy demand. Research from the Climateworks Centre shows thermal upgrades – such as electrifying heating systems and adding insulation, heavy curtains, shade windows and gap sealing – can help detached houses save between 1.4 and 4.0 kilowatts at peak periods. That’s a reduction of up to 77%.
Curbing peak demand is increasingly important, as Australia faces a surge in electricity demand from data centres, electric vehicles and electric household appliances. If we don’t rein in peak demand, we may over-invest in infrastructure needed to generate all this electricity, as well as the poles and wires used to distribute this power.
By limiting unnecessary investment, we can also lower system costs. A recent report found if an 800?resident Melbourne community electrified their homes – for example by replacing gas appliances with efficient electric induction cooktops – planned gas network upgrades can be avoided. In fact, researchers found this would save about A$3.3 million, mainly by avoiding the cost of replacing gas pipes.
Climateworks’ research shows around three million homes must be updated and electrified to meet national emissions targets. This highlights the need for large-scale retrofit programs, stronger minimum rental standards and better installation practices.
However, Australia’s insulation standards are improving, particularly when it comes to newly built homes. Under the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme – which assesses a house’s heating and cooling needs out of ten stars – new homes must be designed to a seven-star minimum rating. However, specific requirements vary between jurisdictions.
Read more: When insulation goes wrong – the science behind why botched retrofits can be so damaging
From July, this scheme is also expanding from new homes to rate established homes, under the Home Energy Rating program. This can provide households with clearer guidance and accredited assessments to help make their existing homes more energy efficient.
State-based programs in Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales also support insulation upgrades.
Alongside government initiatives, the Brotherhood of St Laurence’s Climate Safe Homes pilot helped low-income households make their homes more energy efficient by providing tailored advice, financing and practical assistance.
If you’re keen to make your home more energy efficient while cutting your power costs, here are three practical steps you can take.
ask a Home Energy Rating accredited assessor or qualified insulation installer to assess your existing insulation. You should also look out for government rebates or community programs that can help reduce upfront costs
upgrade ceiling insulation by filling any gaps, topping up existing layers or removing old or ineffective insulation
seal any gaps around doors, windows, floors and unused vents to prevent draughts
if you don’t have wall insulation, consider external blow-in options that involve using a specialised blowing machine to spray insulating materials, such as cellulose or fibreglass, into wall or roof cavities.
Insulation is not just a home upgrade. Rather, it is essential infrastructure for a low-emissions future. And it just might shave some dollars off your next power bill.
Read more: Low-cost and unexpected ways to keep warm and save energy this winter
We would like to acknowledge Victoria Johnson and David Bryant, Brotherhood of St Laurence, for their collaboration and contribution to this article.
Gill Armstrong receives funding from four philanthropic organisations for the Renovation Pathways program. These include Boundless Earth, Energy Consumers Australia, the Paul Ramsay Foundation and the Lord Mayors' Charitable Trust.
Fears the Iran conflict would trigger a surge in power prices have been unfounded. Why? One factor is the very rapid rollout of home and grid-scale batteries.
As a result, Australia’s reliance on expensive gas has fallen and power prices have stayed steady or even fallen.
Now it’s time for policymakers and households to look beyond batteries to hot water systems. For the average Australian home, water heating is still the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (25%). Reliance on gas is a key reason.
Our research has shown efficient electric hot water systems could provide energy storage equivalent to 2 million home batteries while saving billions in energy bills.
Focusing on hot water makes sense. Helping households switch to new systems with much cheaper running costs would act as a powerful lever for energy affordability and equity, while reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.
In the 18 months to June, more than 450,000 home batteries and several grid-scale batteries were installed across Australia.
These removed the need for the equivalent of two large gas-fired power stations during the evening peak, when power prices are highest.
As a result, Australia’s reliance on expensive gas has fallen and power prices have stayed steady or even fallen.
Hot water systems account for a surprisingly high portion of home energy use – about 25%. But this energy use is flexible, as many water heaters can be set to charge when power is cheap.
Each Australian uses about 50 litres of hot water a day. For a family of four, heating this water with a conventional electric storage system uses about 13 kilowatt-hours per day – about the same amount of energy stored in some home batteries.
Costs vary wildly. That same household of four with electric hot water and rooftop solar could pay nothing for hot water. But 40% of Australian homes still rely on gas to heat water, which can cost A$1,000 or more a year.
Newer technologies such as heat pumps have radically reduced how much energy it takes to heat water, cutting running costs up to 72%. Heat pumps draw heat from the air and work even in very low temperatures.
When connected to timers, smart meters or other controls, heat pumps and other electric hot water systems can be set to run during the day. These smart hot water systems provide a simple and cheap way to store large amounts of solar energy.
Pairing smart hot water with the Solar Sharer scheme, which began on July 1 in some states, will mean renters and apartment dwellers without solar could heat water during the hours of free power, substantially cutting their energy bills.
Australia is particularly well placed to make the transition.
Decades of experience have made Australia one of the cheapest places to install rooftop solar.
And when the government announced home battery subsidies and consumer demand soared, the home energy industry was able to quickly pivot.
A national hot water push could build on this momentum.
Successive Australian governments used subsidies to accelerate the rooftop solar rollout. The current government has used the same approach for home batteries. These programs are typically designed to offer subsidies which decline over time before ending as the industry matures.
Policymakers could do the same for smart electric water heaters. Households are already shifting away from gas, but the pace has been slow.
Replacing gas appliances is often cheaper than developing new gas supply, while cutting emissions immediately.
To accelerate the shift, policymakers could introduce four changes:
extend existing modest subsidies for heat pump water heaters in New South Wales and Victoria to cover other states and other smart electric water heaters, coupled with a strong public information campaign
create a scheme to retrofit existing electric water heaters with timers or rewire them to smart meters. This would turn older models into smart water heaters able to run when electricity is cheapest and respond automatically to price signals or grid needs
improve standards to ensure all new systems have to include timers or smart controls. Raising minimum energy performance standards would also allow smaller units to be flexible and more efficient
focus on renters and apartment residents. Too often, clean energy programs benefit standalone owner-occupied homes. It will be essential to support owners’ corporations, social housing providers and local governments to replace shared gas infrastructure
Councils and community organisations could help engage hard-to-reach households. Existing local initiatives are good starting points, but scaling efforts nationally will require coordination and funding.
Targeted support for industry could accelerate development of compact and lower-cost heat pump designs so homes with limited outdoor space can also benefit.
Australia’s extremely rapid uptake of home batteries shows how quickly households can move when the economics stack up and supply chains are ready.
Hot water systems could be the next wave – cheaper than batteries or solar, more inclusive, and hiding in plain sight.
David Roche has received funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the RACE for 2030 Cooperative Research Centre and Dux Industries for hot water systems and flexible demand research.
Chris Briggs has received funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency for research and knowledge-sharing for the Energy Masters program.
Ed Langham has received funding from the RACE for 2030 Cooperative Research Centre and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency for home energy upgrades and demand flexibility research.
Humans have long sought to geoengineer the Earth’s environment. Tim Flannery outlines a few of the wildest ideas from the 20th century
An increasing number of scientists think we have let the climate crisis fester for so long that our only hope to stave off ever-intensifying catastrophes is to use technological interventions. Cloud brightening, injecting sulphur into the atmosphere and the use of tiny mirrors in space – all of which might reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface – are among the concepts being promoted by entrepreneurs and governments alike. Geoengineering, they argue, is now inevitable.
Ever since the God of the Old Testament granted our species dominion over the Earth, ideas of remaking the world to better suit us have been a dominant thread in human thinking. We have for centuries toyed with grand ambitions to alter and re-form the climate and environment, many of which – in retrospect – seem doomed or absurd.
As Britain reached its hottest June temperature on record, readers recall the summer when temperatures hit 36C
The recent heatwave in the UK broke the previous June record of 35.6C, recorded during the 1976 heatwave.
In Lingwood, Norfolk, a provisional temperature of 37.7C was recorded on Friday 26 June, breaking the previous record reached on 28 June 1976 and on 29 June 1957.