Community support for renewable energy
East Gippsland households and businesses have shown their support for an investigation of potential renewable energy projects in the region that could help cut greenhouse emissions, reduce power costs and support local investment.
The ‘Bright Futures’ Renewable Energy Project has completed a stage one assessment of opportunities for renewable energy. The project has identified a range of renewable energy initiatives that could help households, local communities and businesses reduce their energy costs and support local investment in renewable technologies.
East Gippsland Shire Council engaged Dr Rob Passey, from ITP Renewables, to identify opportunities for delivering long-term renewable energy solutions. Following consultation with local business, government and the broader community via workshops, interviews and a shire-wide survey, a range of options have been recommended for East Gippsland.
Dr Passey ‘s report concluded that there are currently no network constraints that limit the amount of renewable energy that can be added to the grid beyond the 5kW limit by Ausnet for small systems and there are many different business models that can be used to enable uptake of renewable energy.
According to the report, these technologies have a number of benefits beyond financial savings. They create local employment, retain electricity expenditure in the community and increase community capacity to deal with network outages.
The report found the installation of one megawatt of solar would create about twenty job-years of direct employment in East Gippsland, avoid about 1,150 tonnes/year of greenhouse gases, and retain an additional $85,000 of expenditure in the region.
The findings of the technical report and community consultation were recently presented informally to council and in a community forum held in Bairnsdale. Both of these documents can be downloaded from the document library on the right hand side of this web page.
The Bright Futures Renewable Energy Project is funded by the Victorian Governments Victorian Climate Change Grant 2015 and New Energy Jobs Fund.
The next stage of the project will finalise the prioritisation of options and develop business cases to support funding for implementation.
