With profits to be made from the provision of renewable electricity, an increasing number of savvy community groups around the world are pooling their resources to get in on the action.
High on Leonards hiill just south of Daylesford, an unusual community picnic warmed the hearts of hundreds of Victorians this autumn, as residents settled in to enjoy the installation of Australia’s first wind farm owned and run by the local community.
“Watching enormous cranes lift the components of the turbines into place was like watching a huge, slow-motion ballet,” says local resident Kate Redwood, also a volunteer director of Hepburn Wind, the co-operative behind the project.
“People brought deck chairs, picnics, kids and dogs, and watched, proud and happy,” she says.
The newly-installed turbines started generating on June 22, as Hepburn Wind begins its quest to create 12,200 megawatt hours (MWh) over the next 12 months - the equivalent of powering 2,300 homes.
Hepburn Wind’s journey began in 2005, when local resistance to a developer-led wind project left one Danish-born resident, Per Bernard, dismayed. Bernard had seen how renewable energy projects run by co-operatives worked, and set about educating Daylesford locals about the benefits of wind.
“Since that time we’ve had over 135 street stalls, and seven bus tours to other sites,” says Redwood.
With a long list of volunteers working behind the scenes, the group managed to raise the $13 million dollars needed to the project off the ground.
“Nine million dollars came from local community subscriptions. Raising money at the same time as the global financial crisis was a huge challenge,” she says.
As expected, that wasn’t the last of the challenges. “Getting a planning permit was a huge, complicated issue. [But] I don’t believe it’s beyond any other community to do this,” she says.
Hepburn Wind may be the first in Australia, but overseas, community-owned windfarms (and to a lesser degree, solar projects) have existed for decades. Unsurprisingly, given their famous love of renewables, it’s the Germans and the Danes leading the pack.
Paul Gipe has worked in the renewable energy sector for decades, and the author of several books on wind energy. “Germany is about two decades ahead of the USA,” he says.
“The Germans and Danes began using feed-in tariffs that we in California developed in the 1980s and then abandoned,” he says.
Gipe believes legislation like Germany‘s Renewable Energy Sources Act plays a key role in progressing renewables, regardless of who owns them. “They revisit the tariffs…periodically,” he says.
While feed-in tariffs are supporting projects across Germany, Canada (particularly Ontario) and Denmark, the latter has a number of other conditions which help community-owned renewables get off the ground. Co-operatives receive higher feed-in tariffs than commercial projects; loan guarantees assist with finding start up funds; and personal tax breaks make earnings from wind power co-operatives attractive.
Of course, it’s not utopia. A change in government policies from 2001 to 2008 ground projects to a virtual standstill, but there are still around 150,000 investors in Denmark’s 2,100 or so co-operatively owned wind farms. It is possibly a hangover from a culture where co-ops are commonplace for shops, apartment buildings and businesses.
Big is beautiful
Community-owned renewable projects aren’t always small. In 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster motivated German mother of five, Ursula Sladek to research alternatives to nuclear power. Ten years later, Sladek and her neighbours took over their local grid, as she became president of a green energy co-operative that today powers over 100,000 German homes and businesses.
“People don’t want to have theories…they want to see and feel local projects that work,” says Sladek. This year the co-operative was awarded the prestigious Goldman Prize for grassroots environmentalism.
Although wind is favoured by many community groups (to date it’s usually more economical than solar), Sladek’s group, Schönau Power Supply, uses both. “We choose solar plants because in the south of Germany wind projects were very difficult to realise, it is more the middle and north for windmills,” she says.
While Schönau Power Supply was born out of concerns about nuclear power rather than climate change, she says today the company’s members and supporters are motivated by both. “After the German government decided to drop out of nuclear energy more and more people realise that now is the time to act,” she says.
The recent Fukushima nuclear incident has also prompted some Japanese to join the regular flow of community groups from around the globe who approach Sladek for inspiration. “Two weeks ago we had a group of Japanese people who…want to make their town 100 per cent renewable,” she says.
A leg up
While community-owned projects like Schönau are happy to showcase their project to others wanting to do the same, in Australia, the role of facilitator falls to Embark, a not-for-profit organisation working to eliminate the barriers for a strong community renewable energy sector at home.
Embark’s executive director, Mary Dougherty, says examples like Hepburn Wind are a good start for Australia. “They have more than 1,800 people who invested in the vision. Sure, it’s small in the scheme of things, but imagine if there were 100 around the country, that’s something different,” she says.
The idea is not far-fetched. Since launching in 2010, Embark has been contacted by over 45 communities keen to create their own renewable-energy initiatives.
“Hepburn has made it possible for others to see it’s achievable. Now we need to create the followers to show government the model works,” she says.
She believes about five groups around the country already developing their business plans. “Our goal is to help them get to planning approval, so they can move into the capital raising phase as quickly as possible,” she says.
For Dougherty, there’s a real benefit to having a vibrant community energy sector, despite the reality that individually, their abatement targets are small scale. “It is an economically efficient way to unlock the power of the community to support more ambitious action on reducing emissions over the longer term,” she says.
Back in Daylesford, turning turbines mean profits are on their way to locals (the structure has been set up to favour local investors over ring-ins), and the Daylesford community is set to benefit from a $30,000 annual grant fund set aside by the co-operative for small environmental projects.
While these are undoubtedly attractive benefits for locals, it may be the ongoing commitment to community engagement that really demonstrates why this co-operative has the overwhelming (although not unanimous) support of its local community.
