Late last year, a group of Gloucester residents on the mid-north NSW coast came together at the Bucketts Way Neighbourhood Centre to voice their concerns about the future of energy and to find a way – as a community – to live more sustainably and reduce their carbon footprint.
As a result, Energise Gloucester, a community-owned renewable energy group was formed. The primary aim of the group is to assist households to understand their energy usage and reduce power costs, as well as raising money to fund various projects to help others convert to renewable energy.
Their first endeavour – installing a solar system on the roof of the Bucketts Way Neighbourhood Centre – was given a huge boost thanks to a $10,000 grant from the Powershop Your Community Energy project, an initiative designed to help fund and support small-scale community energy projects. And it will see the Neighbourhood Centre save thousands of dollars every year on reduced energy bills.
“Energise Gloucester was generated out of a community desire to be proactive in terms of energy management,” explains chairperson David Marston. “There is a real value in being able to generate your own electricity and in this district the sun is a really good resource.
“Our first project was to raise money for a 32kW solar system for the Bucketts Way Neighbourhood Centre, including the $10,000 grant from Powershop, which really got us started. The Neighbourhood Centre is a large space offering a wide range of community services and using a significant amount of power – about 110kW per day – so we thought this would be an effective way to tap into solar. Then the Centre could use the money saved on reduced energy bills to fund their various programs and services.”
Once installed, the solar system is expected to reduce the Neighbourhood Centre’s electricity costs by up to 80 per cent and generate more power than they use for seven to eight months a year, in which case excess energy will be fed back into the grid.
Anna Burley, CEO of the Bucketts Way Neighbourhood Group, which runs the Centre, says this equates to about $15,000 in savings on energy costs each year. Savings that can be directly funnelled back into vital community services, which is crucial for any not-for-profit organisation.
“We’re a hub of multiple human and community services including aged care, disability services, Neighbourhood Centre, health transport and training services,” Burley says. “At the moment we have power bills of about $17,000 to $19,000 per year because we have large area and we have numerous people in our offices.
“Reduced electricity bills will allow us to spend more dollars on community projects. The decreasing of government funding to services such as ours is ever-present. So having the solar system installed and reducing energy costs significantly is a great thing for us because it’s crucial to have facilities such as ours in rural areas.”
Burley says the Gloucester region has a high number of people facing homelessness and that the Neighbourhood Centre also offers help and advice for locals needing to deal with the Department of Housing or Centrelink, along with Legal Aid and financial advice.
“We have a lot of young people in our community who are couch surfing, and we have people who are living in camping reserves,” she says. “Our mission is to connect our community into all of these services. If we weren’t here, many of our residents would not be able to engage with these services.
“There was one particular case we had with an Indigenous woman who was living in a tent with her children at the local caravan park. She had been homeless for about nine months and despite her efforts she had not been able to secure a rental property for her family.
When we heard about this case we assisted her to get into social housing so she and her family had a roof over their heads. On the back of that, she has since undertaken a support program in nursing in aged care and is now employed at the local hospital. So that’s a great outcome. And we have many cases like this.”
Indeed, Burley says the Bucketts Way Group and Neighbourhood Centre help hundreds of people every year and hope to expand their services with the money saved from reduced energy costs.
“One of the big projects we’re working on at the moment is establishing a community kitchen where we can offer training to people as well as fresh-cooked meals for our Meals on Wheels service,” she says.
“We are also looking at running courses in the kitchen on healthy eating on a tight budget – that sort of thing. And further down the track we want to look at employing people with a disability or people without job qualifications, victims of domestic violence etc in the kitchen.”
HOW TO GO GREEN
If you are interested in converting to solar energy and reducing your impact on the environment or finding out more about the Your Community Energy project, go to www.powershop.com.au/guardian
