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.

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:

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.

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.

Airports as influencers of decarbonisation

Addressing the challenge of climate change will require investments in energy-efficient terminals, runways, land development and building systems. It is essential that we explain how changes to airports ‒ just like more efficient aircraft ‒ will actually advance the case of decarbonisation.

If investments are focused on future-proofing an airport, from an environmental, economic and social perspective, they will make use of a range of technologies, some of which may not be fully matured.

To decarbonise, airports and their partners in the aviation industry need the support of appropriate regulation and government policies to facilitate real change.

Appropriate government support and facilitation will help the aviation industry to transition energy sources from fossil fuel to sustainable aviation fuel, as well as accelerate research and development of electric, hybrid and hydrogen aircraft, and vehicles. We are seeing partnerships evolving on a range of green energy projects for the aviation sector, including the development of sustainable fuels for the industry that target net-zero emissions.

In the short-, medium- and long-term, airports have opportunities to demonstrate their ability to combine innovation and technology, to mitigate against and to reduce the effects of climate change, and to create modern state-of-the-art destinations that people will celebrate as they power a region’s growth and resilience into the future.

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About the Authors

Erik Kriel, Aviation Capability Leader at Aurecon, has more than two decades of experience as an airport development planner and strategist, including terminal design, airport master planning, concept designs, capital expenditure planning and airline consultation. He has led consultancy teams in Australia, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Previously, Erik headed Airport Planning for the Airports Company South Africa. He has worked at some of the largest hub airports in the world, including Dubai and Hong Kong as well as some of the most economically sensitive such as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Prior to his current role at Aurecon where he manages the company’s technical aviation capability across Australia & New Zealand, Asia and the Middle East, he was Aviation Lead Consultant on several Australian airport planning projects.

Ben McGarry has been recognised as one of Engineers Australia’s Most Innovative Engineers in the Australian energy market, having worked in energy strategy, infrastructure advisory, project development, project engineering and technology R&D roles in Australia and the US.

As Aurecon’s Future Energy Capability Leader, he leads a group of future-focused experts that develop strategies, policies and projects to embrace the opportunity and navigate the risks of the global energy transition. He is passionate about bringing diverse thinking and harnessing new technologies to solve challenging problems, particularly in our complex, rapidly-transforming electricity systems.

Brett Reiss formerly led Aurecon’s Australia & New Zealand aviation team where he specialised in the management and development of privatised airports. Brett has led the master planning of numerous Australia airports, and has undertaken extensive land use, airfield and terminal planning exercises for airports in Australia and New Zealand. Brett was previously General Manager Commercial Services for Northern Territory Airports.