Decarbonising airports: Taking off to a net zero future

Airports have been on a trajectory in recent years to tailor their passenger offerings and to find a balance between being a place of transit but also a destination – developing into miniature precincts.

While airports, airlines and their partners in the global aviation ecosystem have been justifiably focused on survival through the industry upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, an airport’s contribution to climate change remains a long-term risk that needs to be on the radar of owners and operators.

Reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions can be addressed hand in hand with the industry’s post-pandemic transformation and help airport owners to respond to changing social values and stakeholder expectations.

Now is the time for airport owners to formulate a decarbonisation roadmap towards Net Zero, to pivot towards operations and physical infrastructure that make a positive environmental and social impact.

In this thinking paper, we explore the short-, medium- and long-term opportunities for airports on a pathway to decarbonisation.

Airports as power generators

Airports could be our future energy ecosystems. Now, more than ever, airports can make a meaningful difference towards net zero emissions, and find new efficiencies and income streams to improve their environmental efforts.

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, airports experienced free-fall declines in customer numbers almost overnight. Consequently, revenue generators, all the way from aircraft landing fees to the retail shops, fell dramatically. Additionally, the commercial opportunities associated with non-aeronautical revenue became strained due to economic uncertainty.

To maintain lower operational expenditure and improve revenue generation, airport owners and operators must think beyond traditional infrastructure development and income streams.

Traditionally, airports played a passive or reactive role in energy generation and reticulation. What if they were energy agents, participating in energy markets and contracts in their own right? As part of a decarbonisation roadmap, airport owners could consider entering the energy provider arena by generating power on-site and exploring tangible solutions and commitments to becoming carbon neutral.

As most airports are significant land holders, they could take advantage of the opportunity to develop real estate and become superheroes of change by:

Controlling the usage and site wide impacts of their land holdings for positive environmental, social and economic outcomes

Providing the footprint for alternative energy generation or renewable energy harvesting (such as solar generation or hydrogen production)

An airport as an energy agent would behave much more flexibly in terms of energy consumption and use, as energy markets become more sophisticated. Energy agents use their own information and resources to create value.

For an airport, this may be through its own generation, and managing its own demand and energy storage, while employing a sophisticated energy trading strategy to anticipate future generation, demand and market price, and buy off the grid at the cheapest time. This may assist airports to continue to thrive in the face of major disruptions in the future, maybe not another COVID-19, but certainly environmental or technological disruptions.

Responding to climate change

Environmental factors will feature even more heavily on an airport’s ecosystem, such as comprehensive climate change resilience and adaptation risk management to ensure the continuity of operations and investments. Environmental commitment to surrounding communities could come in the form of noise dampening infrastructure or taxing operators with older engine technologies.

While the airport terminal and infrastructure contribute only a fraction of the total level of global aviation emissions, the spotlight is still on decarbonisation.

If no energy alternatives were considered, what effect would more volatile or rising electricity costs have in the future?
How onerous will future environmental regulations and decarbonisation pressures become?
What strategies are in place to drive a coordinated reduction of the total environmental footprint across the global aviation ecosystem?
Where can efficiencies be found?
How practical, or mature, are new forms of technology for on-site energy generation?
Where in time should initiatives be programmed to balance cost and environmental gain?
Can efficiencies be effectively shared across the multitude of airport stakeholder and user sets?
How can you strengthen the public´s environmental awareness to support changes at the airport?
What data do you need to be able to show the efficiency commercial return on ‘green’ investments’?
How will energy related modernisation affect airport funding costs – are there long-term pricing benefits?

Key questions for airports to consider when formulating a decarbonisation pathway

Expanding non-aeronautical income

The growing expectation of airport owners is to find ways to expand non-aeronautical income to supplement aircraft landing fees and passenger charges. Traditionally this has been through airport-based experiences such as retail, dining, leisure and entertainment. In the future, this could be quite different.

For instance, what if airports could be the energy agent not just for themselves, but also for the precincts around them? They could be ‘hardened energy nodes’ – microgrids with better-than-average resilience to grid disturbances – able to restore power to the grid network to recover from a total or partial shutdown.

Reimagining an airport, not as a standalone business, but as a highly interconnected, living and adaptive environment reflects a broader trend towards ecosystem thinking. It aligns with the notion that airports are significant socio-economic drawcards to their surrounding areas. They provide direct and indirect employment, as well as social (and economic) benefits to people who fly.

These benefits result from two main areas: 1) construction on site, and daily operation of the airport terminals and ground operations; and 2) flights, access to the airport (cars, buses, trains, parking etc.) and associated projects such as hotels and airport-related precinct developments.

Roadmap ideas

A factor in the successful transformation of airports beyond COVID-19 is the opportunity to decarbonise infrastructure, operations and systems. A decarbonised recovery would ensure that aviation continues to provide economic and social benefits to local, regional and national communities.

It is important to be pragmatic about the short-, medium- and long-term opportunities to decarbonise airports.

Purchasing carbon offsets, for example, is a less preferred approach than direct emissions reduction in reaching long-term goals. Some technology is not yet mature enough to implement across every airport estate successfully and cost-effectively, however with future improvements, implementation may become more viable. Successful initiatives, even small in terms of initial investment and return, can contribute to an altered decarbonisation mindset, inspiring an airport to focus on and monitor, emerging technologies.

The pathway to decarbonisation may not be the same for every region, in particular major city and regional, but that is expected, with some regions achieving their milestones earlier than others.

Short-term opportunities

Measures in the short-term (ie those that can be implemented immediately), which may assist airport owners to decarbonise their operations and reduce climate impacts. Short-term measures applied as a long-term strategy to decarbonisation could be the most productive at laying the foundation for a prosperous and sustainable industry.

Short-term measures applied as a long-term strategy to decarbonisation could be the most productive at laying the foundation for a prosperous and sustainable industry.

Inverse runway line marking to reduce the heat island effect from vast expanses of pavement.

Electrical fixed ground power and pre-conditioned air provisions to reduce airport auxiliary power unit inefficiencies.

Roof water collection in rainwater tanks reduces mains potable water use.

Ceramic window films that reflect heat to reduce the greenhouse effects of large, glazed terminal buildings.

Deploy passive daylighting systems, using less energy to keep buildings lit.

Predictive modelling of heating, ventilation and cooling to vary ambient temperatures and reduce the cooling/heating efforts of these systems, optimising performance and economics.

Tactical ground support equipment storage and scheduling to reduce distance driven.

Operational planning to reduce aircraft delays.

Turn the airport facilities into a smart building with low emissions.

Solar canopies on ground-level carparks to offset electricity purchase and power electric vehicle (EV) charging stations.

Deploy hybrid / low emissions landside transport and ground support equipment.

Planning and design of airside to reduce aircraft taxiing distances and congestion.

Ambient temperature reductions at the airport through use of recycled water, pavement sprinklers and introduction of cooling grass crops.

Electrical fixed ground power and pre-conditioned air provisions to reduce airport auxiliary power unit inefficiencies

Inverse runway line marking to reduce the heat island effect from vast expanses of pavement

Ceramic window films that reflect heat to reduce the greenhouse effects of large, glazed terminal buildings

Solar canopies on ground-level carparks to offset electricity purchase and power electric vehicle (EV) charging stations

Predictive modelling of heating, ventilation and cooling to vary ambient temperatures and reduce the cooling/heating efforts of these systems, optimising performance and economics

Purchase alternative/hybrid fuel technology landside transport and ground support equipment

Roof water collection in rainwater tanks reduces mains potable water use

Deploy passive daylighting systems, using less energy to keep buildings lit

Tactical ground support equipment storage and scheduling to reduce distance driven

Operational planning to reduce aircraft delays

Planning and design of airside to reduce aircraft taxiing distances and congestion

Turn the airport facilities into a smart building with low emissions

Tap or hover over the numbers to reveal the opportunities to decarbonise in the short-term.