Goulbourn residents band together to build a solar project
Regional Australia's renewable energy boom has seen residents in Goulbourn band together to build their own project.
Transcript
00:00 Dimity Taylor is doing the rounds on her sheep farm in the New South Wales central tablelands.
00:07 As the sun sets, she gets a regular reminder of how the region is changing.
00:19 For five years the wool and sheep meat producer has lived beside a wind farm at Bannister,
00:24 about 30km northwest of Goulburn.
00:26 They've been a good neighbour, it's part of the reason why she's keen to be involved in
00:31 clean energy.
00:33 So she's investing in a nearly $5 million solar farm being built by a community organisation
00:38 on Goulburn's outskirts.
00:40 People are just excited that the community is owning it, it's not some big foreign company
00:47 that we actually get to be owning this project and driving this project from our community
00:55 and being the change we want to see happen.
01:00 300 Goulburn residents have invested in the solar farm run by Community Energy for Goulburn.
01:06 People have bought one solar panel for $400, right up to an investment of $100,000.
01:13 After eight years of planning and consultation, work has finally begun on this two hectare
01:21 block.
01:24 Ed Suttle is a cattle breeder and Vice President of Community Energy for Goulburn.
01:31 When Landline visited he was giving his team of engineers a tour of the site, and also
01:36 staff from the Australian Rail Track Corporation which has supplied some of the land.
01:42 Once built he says the 4,500 panel farm will be the first community owned solar farm in
01:47 Australia with a battery.
01:50 It was the brainchild of five or six of us, it's the classic kitchen table discussion,
01:57 people who were fed up with the apparent lack of activity at state and federal level about
02:03 developing renewables and ending fossil fuels.
02:07 So in short we felt we needed to do something ourselves.
02:12 All the energy produced will be sold into the grid and it's estimated the farm will
02:16 generate a profit of around 5% per year.
02:20 There are several ways of setting up a community energy project.
02:24 This solar farm here in Goulburn will be run as a cooperative where each investor becomes
02:28 a member of the co-op and receives one vote.
02:31 That means regardless of the size of the investment, every member gets an equal say.
02:37 And with most investors living locally, the profits stay in the community.
02:41 The pure democracy of it was very attractive to our investors.
02:45 It means you don't have one or two rich people potentially taking it over and running it.
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