Low Carbon Australia has helped finance the $1.6m upgrade of a 7,000 square metre office and retail building in Ipswich, Queensland.
The redevelopment of Trident’s Limestone Street Centre featured upgrades to lighting, air-conditioning and a building management system. The three-month building project is expected to produce annual energy savings of 718,000kWH and annual greenhouse gas reductions of 718 tonnes.
Low Carbon Australia helped us with finance for about 90 per cent of the total project cost,” said Justin Goddard, Trident Corporation’s managing director. “What we now have, is a building that has improved its value and uses significantly less energy than before, making it more attractive to tenants as well as underpinning its long-term value. I hope that Limestone Street, which is right at the gateway to Ipswich, will inspire more energy efficiency work in the CBD to support Ipswich’s local economy.”
The building had a zero star National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) result in January 2011, but it is now targeting four stars, said Meg McDonald, Low Carbon Australia’s CEO.
The Limestone Street Centre project is an example of how Low Carbon Australia can create tailored financial solutions for energy efficiency improvements, McDonald said.
“While this was a whole-of-building approach, we can also offer assistance to individual projects, with items like energy efficient lighting, air conditioning and building management systems,” she said. “We’re not limited to commercial properties. We also work with manufacturing and industry to provide finance for energy efficiency upgrades of items such as air compressors, industrial refrigeration, motors, pumps, power factor correction devices, furnaces, cogeneration and trigeneration.”