Finding a Home for the Community Battery

One of the hardest parts of delivering a community energy project, as we are experiencing, is finding the right place to put it.

That is why the backflip on the approved site by Narrabri Shire Council just prior to the battery installation date, was so detrimental to the project. It has set the project back years and continues to risk the delivery of the project entirely. It has also created a number of new and unplanned costs.

It sounds simple: put the battery somewhere in Narrabri where it can store solar energy during the day and share it back to the community at night. But in reality, bringing all the criteria together in one location is one of the toughest parts of the process. Having to start again is even tougher.

It is not a couch, you can't just pick it up and move it.

Why site selection is so tricky

Community batteries need to tick a long list of boxes before they can be built. For Narrabri, we’ve now looked closely at around 15 different sites. Each one has meant going through a detailed checklist to see if it could possibly work.

Some of the main things we have to assess include:

• Land ownership – Who owns the land and are they willing to lease or licence it?

• Zoning – Is the site legally allowed to host this kind of infrastructure?

• Fire and flood risks – Bushfire-prone land is a red flag, while flood-prone areas need extra engineering measures to keep the battery safe.

• Lease costs – Even a suitable block may be ruled out if it comes at a cost as the financial viability of these projects as still being worked out.

• Space and hazards – The battery needs a clear area around it, with no vegetation that could pose a fire hazard to the battery.

• Neighbours – While the fire safety guidelines stipulate three metres’ separation from other buildings, it seems some community members would prefer a larger buffer.

• Environmental considerations - the DA process also considers a whole range of environmental issues.

• Grid connection – And finally, the biggest challenge of all: is there a nearby transformer with enough spare capacity to connect a battery? This is both the hardest to confirm early on and the most critical to the project’s success.

It’s the grid question that usually makes or breaks a site. Even if a transformer looks suitable on paper, Essential Energy has to run detailed studies to confirm whether it can accept a battery, and this involves formal applications, engineering time, and costly connection processes.

Plus The Use Case

All these considerations do not include different use cases for the battery. Community batteries have been identified to try and solve all sorts of problems in the grid - from backing up suburbs in power outages, to supporting voltage changes where lots of solar exists, to supporting the shift of energy demand from day to evening, to providing free or cheaper electricity to neighbours, to directly receiving electricity from neighbours. Different use cases also need different things from their site choice as well.

The Narrabri Community Battery's use case is to interact directly with the grid, absorbing excess day time electricity (from solar), storing it, and providing it back to the grid at night. We have tried, but were unable to secure a retail partner to provide a local retail electricity deal.

Why transparency matters

This challenge is not unique to Narrabri. Across Australia, community energy projects often run into the same wall: it’s difficult to know early in the process whether a site will stack up technically. That means a lot of time, money and goodwill can be spent on options that turn out to be dead ends.

Having more transparent and accessible mapping of the electricity network would be a game changer. If communities could see, at least in broad terms, where the grid has spare capacity, we could focus efforts on the most promising sites from the beginning.

Essential Energy’s role

To their credit, Essential Energy has spent considerable time and energy helping us assess alternative sites. Their cooperation has been vital in working through the technical maze of transformer capacities, network constraints and site specific unique configurations. Without that partnership, this project would have been much harder to progress.

The bigger picture

The Narrabri Community Battery is just one example of the broader challenge facing community-led energy projects. The technology is here. The motivation is strong. But unless the process of finding and assessing sites can be clearer and more streamlined, many communities will continue to face the same uphill battle we’ve experienced.

Despite the setbacks, we’re still moving forward - and every step teaches us more about how to make the next project easier. By sharing our experience, we hope to shine a light on the invisible but crucial part of the energy transition: simply finding the right place to plug in.