Presenting at the Misinfo and Disinfo Hearing
- Sally Hunter
- Nov 17
- 3 min read
On Thursday (13/11/2025) Sally Hunter spoke as a witness to the Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy at their public hearing in Sydney. Geni.Energy was invited to attend by RE-Alliance following RE-Alliance’s submission to the committee.
The RE-Alliance panel included Andrew Bray, Sally and Lindsay Marriott of South Gippsland (pictured below), allowing the panel to hear directly from regional voices.
It was worthwhile to document our local experience and consider it in terms of misinformation and disinformation.
If you’d like to listen to our session, you can listen to a recording here.
I will put below here the opening statement that I had prepared.
Below here are the various media articles that resulted from presenting to the hearing.
I am part of the Regional Leaders Newtork formed by RE-Alliance and a founder of Geni.Energy. We are a non-profit organisation started in 2020 and receiving federal funding for a community battery in 2023. What I present here is just a small and recent case example of misinformation.
We have collaborated with Narrabri Shire Council since ‘22 on the Narrabri Community Battery. This included:
a letter of support for the grant application and an MOU
A council motion of support 8-0
Council staff identified the location and developed the project named the “Narrabri Renewable Energy Hub” which included the community battery, EV chargers and a solar covered carpark
Council developed the DA, and a modification to the DA, the DA was approved and a construction certificate was issued
We had been negotiating the rental agreement for the carpark spaces for more than 6 months
It was at this point that the wheels fell off and it left a void for misinformation to propagate.
In the end Councillors blocked the staff from finalising the rental agreement which was enough to kill the project.
I cannot say who was pulling what levers but I do know what occurred was not due process nor was it based on fact.
The types of misinformation I experienced at council meetings were:
Loose language - words such as “blowing up” and “catch fire all the time” “shutting down the whole town for 7 days” etc.
Conflation of technology types and scales - one council meeting the community battery was compared directly with drill batteries for how often it will blow up, the next it was compared to a grid scale battery 900 times larger for how long it will burn for
There was a total lack of comparative risk analysis with existing technologies in our lives
Fear is the most powerful motivator and a difficult emotion for facts to overcome.
Our biggest challenge is that everyday people are expected to be knowledgeable about energy and if they own a phone, they are self appointed experts on really complex issues and are sometimes put in positions of power. We were never given enough time to correct misinformation as we were relegated to two three minute presentations at council meetings and no right of reply.
A key driver was local community Facebook pages - the castle of propagated misinformation.
In one instance I believe we experienced disinformation when a fake profile, Joey Perth, was created and used to deliberately deceive.
Ultimately this situation set me back two years of development time and wasted probably in the hundreds of thousands of tax/rate payers dollars. And it has helped to slow the transition to renewables as we are all aware of the importance of storage in the grid now.
Most sadly for me it dashed plans for 100% of the profits going to community benefits. We had hoped these would be legacy projects helping community groups reduce cost and be more resilient using renewables.
An initiative such as Local Energy Hubs would have helped provide us with local support and resourcing to try and short circuit the misinformation. We did have a letter from Minister Bowen showing his support but this was all too late by then, so more federal support could have helped earlier.
I will finish with part of a quote from a letter published in our paper from one of our local supporters. In Judy’s own words “what is so hurtful to the battery’s… supporters is the misinformation that some councillors are implying. …Councillors told the council meeting several times that there would be no community benefit to come from the battery, which is completely untrue. … What a huge disappointment that is for the supporters of the battery.”
The short report that Geni.Energy submitted to the Inquiry can be seen here.
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