Rome & Milan Airports get energy efficiency test underway

A European Union study shows that 500 airports in the 28 member countries together emit as much CO2 as a city of 50 million people. Airport buildings are disastrously inefficient structures which produce large quantities of greenhouse gases. With new airports and vast terminals being built across the planet, pressure is on the airline industry to improve its performance, so in a bid to try to curb the problem, the EU has begun a three year programme to cut airport emissions by 20%. Read More

Leaving on a jet plane? Your airport could be a big climate culprit

By Paul Brown for Copy Carbon (8 August 2014):

A European Union study shows that 500 airports in the 28 member countries together emit as much CO2 as a city of 50 million people. Airport buildings are disastrously inefficient structures which produce large quantities of greenhouse gases. With new airports and vast terminals being built across the planet, pressure is bound to grow on the airline industry to improve its performance, so in a bid to try to curb the problem the EU has begun a three-year programme to cut airport emissions by 20%.

It’s not just about those jets. Airport buildings belch greenhouse gases and make an outsized contribution to climate change, according to a new European study.

Airlines are under increasing pressure to use more efficient aircraft to reduce the growing damage the industry is inflicting on the planet.

In its defence, the industry says it produces only 2% of the world’s carbon dioxide and 12% of the total emitted from the transport sector, and that is tiny when compared with automobiles, which produce 74% of the CO2 emitted from transportation.

But in this battle of statistics the role of airports, the vast air-conditioned waiting rooms and shopping malls containing thousands of waiting passengers, has not been taken into account.

Now a European Union study is showing that Europe’s 500 airports in the 28 member countries together emit as much CO2 as a city of 50 million people.

The paper says airport buildings are disastrously inefficient structures which produce large quantities of greenhouse gases. Big airports each have emissions equal to a city of 100,000 people.

With new airports and vast terminals being built across the planet at an ever-increasing rate to facilitate the boom in tourism and business travel, pressure is bound to grow on the airline industry to improve its performance.

In a bid to try to curb the problem the EU has begun a three-year programme costing more than €3 million (US$4m) to cut emissions by 20%.

Cheap and easy

The problem is that the heating, ventilation and air conditioning plants consume half the energy used in each airport. The EU’s solution is to use computers to carefully control the plants so that faults are detected immediately and waste is kept to a minimum.

Two Italian airports, Fiumicino in Rome and Malpensa in Milan, used by 55 million people a year, agreed to test the scheme.

The engineers concentrated on the large air conditioning units, chiller plants and cooling towers at the airports. They found equipment running when it was not needed, incorrect heating and cooling settings, poor positioning of sensors and poor maintenance.

Just by simple inexpensive measures like re-setting heating controls and replacing faulty sensors, each airport could save 3,500 tonnes of CO2 a year, the study found.

The project coordinator, Nicolas Réhault, head of group building performance optimization at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg, Germany, said the same software could be applied to other complex buildings and save large quantities of energy and emissions.

False comparison

“Airports are very complex infrastructures,” he said. “We have gained a lot of know-how on how these infrastructures work. This can be replicated to other highly complex buildings such as hospitals and banks. And it could be downscaled to simpler things, too.”

Airports Council International is so impressed by the results that it plans to demonstrate the results of the pilot project to Europe’s biggest airports in an attempt to get them to adopt the system.

The project will no doubt help the European Commission’s goals to cut overall carbon dioxide emissions but this focus on wasteful airports will also increase pressure on the industry to improve its performance.

Simply comparing emissions from each source – aircraft, trains and cars – does not tell the whole story for the aviation sector. For example, aviation is said to be more damaging because its emissions are high in the atmosphere and cause contrails that trap heat.

Environmental groups are likely to factor in the role of airports in increasing emissions when lobbying governments to take some action on aviation in future climate talks. – Climate News Network

Source: www.copycarbon.com