We have been getting interested community groups contact us about community batteries, so we thought we would put an overview here.
This pic is Yarra's community battery built by Yarra Energy Foundation in Victoria. See more here.
In December the federal government delivered on its election commitment of $200 million to fund 400 community batteries across Australia. It released the guidelines of two streams of funding. Stream One listed 56 local government areas that were eligible to apply for funding and Stream Two listed 2 eligible organisations.
Geni.Energy was thrilled to be one of the orgs listed in Stream Two.
If you want to see if you LGA is listed in Stream One, go here.
What does that mean?
It means essential we do not have to complete with other applicants for the funding. Geni.Energy is the only one who can apply at all in our Parkes electorate.
Why?
Who knows how the mysterious machinations of government work but we are grateful to have been working on this trajectory for a couple of years with the University of New South Wales so we had done a lot of thinking and planning about a community battery already.
This, along with writing to the Labor party about Narrabri's situation seemed to help. During the election campaign Labor member, Pat Conway and our local Labor candidate Jack Ayoub came to the Geni.Energy shop to announce the commitment.
We are a not-profit company with a mission to bring more renewables to rural areas so we want to help others. We have started to pull together some resources to help you too, so check out our webpage for community battery info.
Grant Applications are due
This Friday night we will be celebrating because our grant application will have been submitted. There has been a lot of collaboration and a lot of work go into making this happen and we thank our partners, Acacia Energy!
What's Next
If you were not eligible for this first round of funding, remember that the original commitment was for 400 batteries. The next lot of community batteries will be handled through ARENA later this year. We are still waiting to find out more about this program, but you could start to get your community ready now.