Decarbonising Wellington's pools: 2,916 tonnes of carbon and $10 million saved

When I ran for Council I promised that we would get the decarbonisation of our pools back into the Long-Term Plan. Today I kept that promise. We’re going to reduce our carbon emissions by 2,916 tons and save $10 million dollars over the next 10 years in the process.

Putting it in perspective

In FY21 we used 48,500 Gigajoules of natural gas to heat our pools. But what does that actually look like?

By itself, decarbonising our swimming pools will reduce our total carbon emissions by 6%, and when you add that to all of the other initiatives in our Long-Term Plan you’re looking at a reduction of 44%. A massive win for people and the environment.

What does it actually involve?

You may think it’s as simple as just installing electric heaters and removing the gas ones? Well not quite.

Many of our pools were built years, and even decades ago. That means that they’re not super efficient at keeping heat in, like much of our housing stock. The first step is actually improving the way our building perform by insulating them and measuring how much energy is needed to heat them. That means we can save on natural gas before even switchin out any equipment.

Once we have a good idea of how much energy is used to heat the pools when they’re insulated we can then move on to ordering and installing electric heat pumps. In some places these heat pumps require enough power that we’ll need to work with Wellington Electricity to install new transformers.

When will this happen?

This is a project that will happen over the whole Long-Term Plan. To avoid closing our pools for extended periods of time we’re aligning the project to our existing pool maintenance schedule. That means we won’t need any closures on top of what we already have planned.

We’ll be starting off by improving the heat containment of the existing buildings before switching over to electric heaters. We’re planing on starting with the Regional Aquatic Centre in Kilbirnie, then making our way through Keith Spry, Karori, Tawa, and finally Freyberg Pool.

Who supported the project?

The vote was “Agree to allocate $14m from the Climate Resilience Fund to degasify the pool network.”

For: Mayor Whanau, Councillor Chung, Deputy Mayor Foon, Councillor Matthews, Councillor Rogers, Councillor O'Neill, Councillor Free, Councillor Apanowicz, Councillor Calvert, Pouiwi Hohaia, Councillor McNulty, Councillor Wi Neera, Councillor Abdurahman, Pouiwi Kelly

Against: Councillor Pannett, Councillor Brown, Councillor Randle, Councillor Young