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Community Solar: Clean Energy 4 Goulburn

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A group of residents in Goulburn have joined together to create a community solar farm. The 1.2MW AC output Clean Energy 4 Goulburn solar farm will have 4000 non-reflective PV solar panels and the capacity to power between 350 and 500 houses in the region. It will be completed in 2018. 

Clean Energy 4 Goulburn

Clean Energy 4 Goulburn Team
Clean Energy 4 Goulburn Team (source: ce4g.org.au)

After a lack of interest in renewable energy for Goulburn, a group of seven locals led by group president Ed Suttle, formed Clean Energy 4 Goulburn in 2014.  They were hoping to raise $2m to finance their project, with around 50% coming from the local community, as the group made a commitment that they will be majority community owned. 

Following a viable feasibility study in 2015/16, a DA was made to the Goulburn Mulwaree Council for their solar farm to be built on a 2.5-hectare site east of Goulburn owned by Divall’s Haulage. After a protracted approval process, CE4G are partnering with Essential Energy (which in itself took 5 months to be approved), who own the power infrastructure in Goulburn, to get permission to use their poles and wires to transport the energy.

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the GE4G team are hoping to sell 50% of its eventual renewable output to one major end users (e.g. local government or a large institution), and the remaining 50% can be sold (via an electricity retailer) to the greater Goulburn community. 

Click here to visit the Clean Energy 4 Goulburn site and learn more about their plans.

The $380m Gunning Solar Farm is about 50km west of Goulburn (and is still in early development stages) but other than that there aren’t any other solar farms in Goulburn right now. 

Community Solar Farms

Earlier this year investors sunk over $3m into Australia’s largest community solar project in Canberra – the Majura Solar Farm. This is expected to be completed in 2018 also and, with 533 backers, certainly won’t be the last time we see community solar farms being built in Australia. Bringing the power back to the people, especially in rural areas, is going to get a lot larger over the coming years. 

See a video about the Goulburn community solar farm below! 

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Enova becomes community solar generator.

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Byron Bay based community solar company Enova have become a generator as well as a reseller of renewable energy, pushing them one step closer to taking on the ‘dirty’ energy companies with their environmentally friendly product. They don’t, however, have any large-scale solar or wind farms to generate or sell this energy – the vast majority of their energy will be generated by small systems. We’ve previously explored the idea of community solar farms, but this takes it one step more granular – household level PV solar generation and distribution is a really interesting model and we’re excited to see how it works for Enova (and who else decides to give it a shot). 

Enova’s Community Solar Timeline

Enova - Community Solar
Enova – Community Solar Power (site: enovaenergy.com.au)

Enova boosted their solar feed-in tariff to 16c/kWh around 8 weeks ago in what may have been preparation for this new business move – they have an 18kW system on their office rooftop to show that everyone can be part of the community solar revolution – and the energy doesn’t have to come from massive, billion-dollar investments – everyday users can play their part in wresting power (pun unintended) back from the major retailers. 

Tony Pfeiffer, managing director of Enova, was quoted as saying “Fossil fuels are on the way out and complete reliance on large- scale energy generation will not be far behind.” Pfeiffer discussed his ideas with regards to the future of energy production – writing that “The future is all about locally generated and locally consumed renewable energy and Enova is making that possible right here, right now, beginning in the Northern Rivers region of NSW.”

According to a statement on Enova’s website, they’re able to meet approximately 40% of existing user requirements with this model – so it’ll be interesting to see what level of success they have and if it helps pave the way for community solar generation and community owned solar. We’ll keep you posted! 

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