Empowering neighborhoods: Analysing community battery initiative's funding recipients

A significant milestone in Australia's energy transition

In May 2023, the Federal Government announced who was successful in their application for a community battery under Stream 1 of the Community Batteries for Household Solar program. Dive into the details and explore the key aspects surrounding the program's recipients, funding, battery capacity, and future opportunities.

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Neighbourhood batteries: What are the benefits? Insights for successful feasibility projects

What we’ve learned about neighbourhood batteries

For the past five years, we’ve been working on various neighbourhood battery projects. Read on to find out the benefits of neighbourhood batteries as well as what we’ve learned about effective feasibility projects.

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Inner city sustainability precinct (Younghusband and IIG)

Great to see ongoing development and progress with the Younghusband development by Impact Investment Group (https://www.impact-group.com.au/).

IIG announced two big tenants and move towards delivering stage 1 of the masterplan - announced in the AFR yesterday: https://www.afr.com/property/commercial/fresh-legs-for-a-younghusband-20200213-p540gr

Wave Consulting drafted the initial sustainability master plan, with a target of zero water and energy use across the whole precinct. We put forward a range of innovative ways to achieve these targets.

We continue to seek and develop creative ways to reduce water and energy demands, and create distributed and smarter local systems.

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(Image source: AFR, IIG, Woods Bagot)

5 insights from Spark Conference 2018

Spent the day at the Spark Conference 2018 today. Great line up of renewable energy, climate and innovators from across the country. Five things I picked up today were:

  1. Victoria Solar incentive program will deliver 2GW of capacity (that is huge). More details here https://www.solar.vic.gov.au/

  2. Yes this a '“climate crisis/emergency”. ACF CEO Kelly O’Shanassy talked about the issues in using these terms, but more importantly it is about moving people to take action.

  3. Your super can change things. Superannuation is boring, but actually important. We heard that super is actually a larger volume of $ than sits in the ASX. You can choose to change your super funds to funds that are explicitly investing in better climate and renewable technologies.

  4. Plethora of models for tenants and community energy structures. Great to hear how Pingala, Allume and Sun Tenants are doing new things. Always interesting to hear how things work - i.e. who owns what and who pays for what. These companies are helping more people take action and generate and use more renewable power.

  5. Scaling from one house to precincts is key. Josh Bryne had a nice update on how the White Gum Valley project was going - lots of good stuff with water and energy. And also interesting mention of energy and water links - a favourite of ours!

This day has been great in inspiring us to continue to work towards more community solar and microgrid projects - so stay tuned for updates on these ideas and projects.

I tweeted a few facts and thoughts throughout the day. See below.