Environmental Goals & Impacts

Most neighbourhood battery projects have environmental goals as core values. On top of this, all projects have legal and moral responsibilities to avoid negative environmental impacts. Assessing the extent to which your project meets environmental goals and standards is important to ongoing delivery of your core values and ongoing support from the community. Further to this, you may need to demonstrate environmental credentials to secure ongoing funding and revenue, and to meet changing legislative requirements, particularly associated with emissions targets. For example, in August 2022 it was voted on that the National Electricity Objective (NEO) will include a key objective for emissions reduction.

The first step in environmental evaluation is to revisit your goals and the proposed environmental services in your business model. These provide objectives against which you can assess the performance of the battery. 

After that, assessing the environmental impact of battery storage requires consideration of the entire battery lifecycle from manufacture to use-stage to retirement, recycling and disposal. The battery lifecycle stage with the highest impact in terms of decarbonisation is the use-stage and is largely impacted by consideration of the emissions associated with the electricity used to charge the battery.

As our grids transition to be increasingly powered by renewables, concern around the emissions associated with grid electricity will become redundant. Until then, there are valid concerns that charging batteries from higher emissions electricity like that from coal-powered plants and displacing renewable electricity and/or less emissions intensive electricity like that from hydro and gas-powered plants, can result in battery storage actually increasing net emissions. 

To ensure that the battery has a net negative impact on emissions, you will need to account for the emissions associated across these four stages of the battery’s lifetime, shown in the figure below. These have been summarised here as embedded emissions and operational emissions.