Helping Sydney Airport achieve climate resilience

Sydney Airport Corporation (SYD) is committed to reducing their Scope 3 (external) emissions, and Beca is providing them with a clear pathway towards this vital goal.

We're doing this by developing a strategic plan to increase the deployment of Electric Ground Service Equipment (eGSE) and the use of Electric Fixed Ground Services (eFGS) for servicing aircraft.

Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport (SYD) is Australia’s largest and a key transport hub for the broader Oceania region. With 40-50 million passengers and 350,000 aircraft movements per annum pre-COVID, it’s also a very energy-intensive operation. That’s why SYD have committed to becoming an industry leader on the sustainability frontier.

To help them achieve their climate resilience ambitions, we were engaged by airport management to lead a comprehensive study alongside Airbiz and Aalto to investigate the potential to reduce Scope 3 emissions generated by airport ground operations.

We began by benchmarking comparable global peers to see what has worked overseas, namely converting Ground Services Equipment (GSE) fleet to Electric Vehicle (EV) technology and through the facilitation of increased use of Fixed Ground Services (FGS) for aircraft stand operations.

We also identified financial and operational benefits to SYD, ground service providers and airline operators from the increased uptake of EV's and FGS, and undertook financial and economic modelling of eGSE deployment scenarios. 

In consultation with Sydney Airport ground handling agencies, we also identified the infrastructure and policy improvements required to increase the long-term uptake of eGSE, and support the replacement of diesel vehicles across the airside environment to electric alternatives.

Our study indicated that by aggressively facilitating eGSE adoption and increased use of FGS, Sydney Airport could reduce absolute “Scope 3” CO₂ emissions from aircraft ground servicing by up to 69%.

The final report was delivered earlier this year and has provided Sydney Airport with a clear pathway towards achieving significant airside emissions reductions – setting them up for a cleaner future.

Image Credit: Sydney Airport Corporation Limited, 2022