The head of a company with plans to connect the entirety of Milawa to a solar micro-grid does not back down from his motive to move away from energy retailers: “I don’t like them, they charge me a fortune”.
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Countrywide Renewable Energy director Geoff Drucker addressed a community meeting of about 25 people on Thursday night.
The company has won a $100,000 Victorian government grant to develop a business case for the ambitious project.
The vision is for all homes and businesses in Milawa, including Brown Brothers and the Cheese Factory, to use energy generated from a 10-hectare solar farm proposed for the town.
“I imagine that your cost of energy will come down,” Mr Drucker said.
“At no stage are we talking about chopping the town of Milawa off the grid.
“What we are talking about is an opportunity to generate our own power in Milawa, day and night, and total energy security for Milawa.”
Countrywide is also looking into storing excess renewable energy using hydrogen fuel cell technology.
But Mr Drucker is looking bigger.
“They’re very involved in a micro-grid at Yackandandah, which is very much a smaller version and a little bit more of a disparate version of what we hope to plan for Milawa. Milawa will be an all-encompassing, everybody part of the micro-grid,” he said.
“We’ll become the landmark site in Victoria for a micro-grid of significant proportion, not just a little town with a few houses here and there involved.”
Both projects will use a community energy retailer to facilitate the purchase and sharing of power.
TRY’s organisers have set up its retailer called Indigo Power, to launch next year.
“If we end up working with that community energy retailer, great, if we set one up and they end up working as part of ours - I just don’t know,” Mr Drucker said.
Countrywide is also working with Deakin University and CSIRO to look into the details of how the micro-grid would work and how far outside of the Milawa township it would spread.
Wangaratta Council has also offered it support, but the approval of solar farms will come down to councillors and the community.
The decision on a solar farm proposed for nearby Glenrowan is off to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal after it was rejected by the council.
“If this ends up a bun fight at VCAT, we’re not going to go there,” Mr Drucker said.
“The next stage will be to find whos going to pay for it … We can go to investment funds like superannuation funds, pension funds that want these long-term energy generation projects.”
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