I went to Canberra yesterday to impress upon our elected members the need for Local Energy Hubs across the nation. We need an urgent response, properly resourced and a trusted delivery.
Geni.Energy is a proven case example of how these Local Energy Hubs can work and we look forward to a network across the nation.
Below is the presentation I made.
Hi I’m Sally Hunter, I live on a farm on Gomeroi country, near Narrabri in northwest NSW. These are my three sons and husband. You can see our solar in the background and we have batteries and an EV along with growing much of our own food in our food forest.
I have worked most of my life in community and economic development of rural communities in Qld and NSW. I helped get funding to install some of the first mobile phone towers in western Qld when Telstra was privatised. I also helped businesses get into websites and even e-commerce when the days of the dot com boom were starting. This was a time when some business models completely tanked and others flourished and I watched how some businesses took on this new way of doing business and others didn’t. I draw a lot of similarities with today’s energy transition and the changes needed in rural businesses.
I have been working to raise awareness of the social impacts from large scale mining developments for the last 9 years as five coal mines and an approved gasfield have developed within my neighbourhood. Many of these lessons I have also bought to the energy transition puzzle.
5 years ago a few of us who were concerned about the urgency of the climate crisis, frustrated by the lack of action around renewables in our region (given we are not in a renewable energy zone), I founded Geni.Energy. It’s a not-for-profit organisation with six directors. We opened a shopfront in the main street of Narrabri in September of 2020 and have been helping people install solar and batteries since then. We’ve completed over 80 installs which equivalates to emissions reductions of taking 190 cars off the roads so far.
We also host loads of events on topics such as the electricity grid, the energy transition, energy saving, electric vehicles and community batteries.
We are locally based with local staff, sponsoring local sports teams and providing a credible face of the renewables sector. There is much evidence that it is at this one on one and small group interaction where the most effective change happens. We believe that by people directly participating in practical projects where the benefits of renewables can be experienced first-hand, is where we get the most effective change.
Much like the dot com era, our rural communities can choose to be at the table, or on the menu. We can choose to let our rural towns be the last to get cheaper power or take advantage of new energy technologies or be overrun with large scale developers who do not put community benefits first. Or we can get educated, get engaged and get on the front foot. But we need help. To date philanthropy has supported Geni.Energy but there is coming a point where we are asking if this is really the responsibility of philanthropy. Rural communities are being asked to do much of the heavy lifting in the energy transition and we need resources, we need skills and leadership. We need the opportunity to implement locally led solutions, with local people at the forefront to determine the future of their communities.
One such example is the Manilla Solar Farm (not far from Narrabri) which is currently seeking local investors so that it will become Australia’s largest community owned solar farm. This has taken ten years of volunteer labour to get to this point, locals upskilling themselves and providing that leadership. But with locals owning a slice of it and creating a return from it, it will shift the dial on social acceptance and on self-determination of our rural communities.
We are now seeing large scale renewable projects coming into our region. Such as one solar farm to be built 10km from my place which has created division, fed by misinformation into a storm that urgently needs skilled people to help navigate these challenges and policy change to back them up.
And finally, Geni.Energy is in the final planning stages of our community battery to be installed in the middle of Narrabri in March 2025 thanks to some federal government funding and three years of volunteer blood sweat and tears! There are already some 250 community energy groups around Australia trying to solve some of these challenges, imagine what a little coordination of that could achieve.
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