Resilient Buildings and Distributed Energy: A Grassroots Community Response to the Climate Emergency
Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW 2007, Australia
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editors: Deo Prasad and Lan Ding
Sustainability 2022, 14(6), 3186; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063186
Received: 13 November 2021
/
Revised: 18 February 2022
/
Accepted: 22 February 2022
/
Published: 8 March 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Responding to Climate Emergency: Design, Planning and Assessment of the Built Environment)
The severity and incidence of extreme weather events are increasing with climate change. In particular, wildfires are becoming more frequent, more intense, and longer lasting than before. Fuelled by long periods of dryness and high temperatures, the Australian wildfires of 2019/2020 were record breaking in terms of destruction and chaos. Rural communities were severely affected by power cuts disabling access to essential services. Following the wildfires, a concept for energy resilient public buildings (“Emergency Distributed Energy System”) emerged as a grassroots community idea from the wildfire-affected area of Gippsland, southeast Australia. A combination of desktop and empirical research explored international examples of energy resilience and climate mitigation, the local services and technologies that are needed in Gippsland, and the legal and regulatory challenges and enablers in Australia. The findings were informed by case studies of responses to natural disasters that included California and Greece (wildfires), New Zealand (earthquake), and India (cyclone). The results determined that community resilience can be increased by offering a more reliable electricity supply that would support greater social, political, and economic structures. The deployment of resilient energy systems should be driven by political will, economic incentives and working with communities to support a concerted shift towards low-emissions and distributed energy technologies.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
climate change; renewable energy; communities; grassroots movement; energy resilience; distributed energy systems; multi-governance; energy transition; grid infrastructure; buildings
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
MDPI and ACS Style
Niklas, S.; Alexander, D.; Dwyer, S. Resilient Buildings and Distributed Energy: A Grassroots Community Response to the Climate Emergency. Sustainability 2022, 14, 3186. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063186
AMA Style
Niklas S, Alexander D, Dwyer S. Resilient Buildings and Distributed Energy: A Grassroots Community Response to the Climate Emergency. Sustainability. 2022; 14(6):3186. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063186
Chicago/Turabian StyleNiklas, Sarah, Dani Alexander, and Scott Dwyer. 2022. "Resilient Buildings and Distributed Energy: A Grassroots Community Response to the Climate Emergency" Sustainability 14, no. 6: 3186. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063186
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
