Sydney Catchment Authority

The Sydney Catchment Authority

81 vehicles
369 tonnes of CO₂-e

The Sydney Catchment Authority (SCA) is a NSW Government agency that helps manage and protect Sydney's drinking water catchments and catchment infrastructure. The SCA supplies bulk raw water to its customers, including Sydney Water and a number of local councils.

The SCA works to protect human health, prevent degradation of the environment, research and inform the community about water quality and supply. Nearly four million people, or about 60 percent of the NSW population, consume water supplied by the SCA.

Due to the geographic spread of the catchment areas, the SCA has a very large operational and pool vehicle fleet (around 0.6 cars per person). It is important to balance the greenhouse gas emissions from the fleet vehicles through initiatives such as Greenfleet. The SCA also has two hybrid electric vehicles.

The SCA is reducing greenhouse gas emissions from other energy sources such as wood and electricity in accordance with the SCA Energy Management Plan. Wood fired barbecues at SCA dam picnic areas have been replaced with electric ones to save greenhouse gases.

Since 2003, the SCA purchases 10 per cent of its electricity from accredited GreenPower for its electricity purchase from three electricity retailers.

The SCA has investigated the feasibility of building mini-hydro at its dams to generate electricity for site use from environmental releases and is looking at building the financially feasible plants. In addition to this, the SCA is also looking at various demand management initiatives to reduce electrical demand on the electricity network.

For further information, please visit www.sca.nsw.gov.au