Michael Green

Writer and producer

You can never have too much garlic

In Community development, Environment, The Age on

Around Melbourne, a bunch of first-time farmers are sowing their cloves.

Em Herring has grown garlic once before: in an old tyre on her grandpa’s beef cattle farm in Gloucester, NSW, when she was only 8 years old.

“He said to me, ‘Emily, if there’s one crop you grow when you’re older, it should be garlic’,” she recalls. “It’s funny that I’ve come full-circle.”

Herring is now 25, a tertiary-trained musician living in Northcote, and she’s turning back to the land.

She’s one of a dozen people – overwhelmingly young women – who are taking part in the inaugural Pop Up Garlic Farmers program, run by a group called Farmer Incubator.

From left, Paul Miragliotta, Emily Connors and Em Herring, with Age photographer Simon Schluter. Credit: Farmer Incubator

The fledgling farmers have each sown 500 cloves, at four different donor farms around Melbourne – in Coburg, Keilor, Ballan and the Mornington Peninsula. They’ll take the crop all the way from seed to market, harvesting in December, and learning about sales and marketing along the way.

“It’s a way to engage people in the city with farming,” explains Paul Miragliotta, from Farmer Incubator. “There are lots of positive things you can do in agriculture, like regenerating the land and growing local food systems. But getting into it is quite daunting if you’re not from a farm, or don’t have much money.”

The 32-year-old is in a similar situation himself, having recently taken his first lease on a small farm in Keilor.

He says garlic is the ideal crop for the experiment: it grows slowly over winter, which eases the pressure for watering; and it stores well, so the farmers won’t have to sell on a deadline.

“We’re also trying, in a small way, to bridge the gap between imported, supermarket garlic and boutique, farmers’ market garlic,” Miragliotta says.

Before Pop Up Garlic Farmers began, he interviewed six experienced growers for their tips. Number one is to avoid a “weedy nightmare”, he says. “Weeds are like street fighters and garlic can’t compete with them.”

Emily Connors hasn’t grown garlic before. She grew up in Sandringham, without a veggie patch. She always shopped at supermarkets and had no understanding of her food, how it was grown, or by whom. “I went to an all-girls Catholic school and I don’t remember a seeing a farmer at the careers nights!” she laughs.

She now works at CERES in Brunswick East, often labouring at its Harding Street market garden in Coburg, where she recently sowed her first garlic crop. The site has been a market garden since the late 1800s, when Chinese migrants began farming on the banks of the Merri Creek.

“I feel like I’m part of that rich tradition,” Connors says. She hopes the coming months will help steer her towards a market garden of her own.

“We have a food system dominated by companies which are profit-driven, rather than focussing on nurturing people and land,” she says. “This a perfect way of countering that system, and connecting our community with our food.”

Read this article at The Age online

Renewed interest in renewables

In Environment, The Age on

WOODEND residents are staging a renewable energy revival, spurred by the incoming state government.

The local sustainability group is launching two green energy projects: a new solar energy scheme and the resurrection of a longstanding plan for three community-owned wind turbines.

Today, at the Sustainable Living Festival in Woodend, Energy and Resources Minister Lily D’Ambrosio will announce a $100,000 grant for a 30-kilowatt solar farm.

The panels will be installed at the old timber mill, where the tenants’ ongoing electricity bills will be reinvested in further solar panels. It will create a “perpetual fund” for community renewable energy, says Ralf Thesing, president of the Macedon Ranges Sustainability Group.

Last week, D’Ambrosio announced a $200,000 grant for the central Victorian town of Newstead to become fully powered by renewable energy.

She says the new government will “support and stand alongside” communities such as Newstead and Woodend, who are planning “to better control how their energy is made and where it comes from”.

“Everywhere I go, whether it’s metro Melbourne or regional and rural Victoria, people love renewable energy,” D’Ambrosio says. “That’s why we’re seeing many communities coming up with plans to make renewable energy part of their everyday life. They’re bottom-up approaches and they’re a terrific boon for local jobs.”

The Andrews government is preparing a “renewable energy action plan” and finalising the guidelines for its $20 million “new energy jobs fund”. It will also release a discussion paper on community-owned wind power.

For the clean energy advocates in Macedon Ranges shire, the election result was transformative. “It changes our situation completely – from being banned, we’re now unbanned,” says Barry Mann, who is helping coordinate the wind power project.

In 2010, under the previous state Labor government, the group was awarded a $50,000 grant for a wind monitoring mast. But the funding wasn’t finalised until after the Liberal party won the election. Within three weeks of handing over the cash, the new government had imposed a wind power “no-go” zone over the entire region.

“It was pretty clear to me that the policy wasn’t based on any evidence or community consultation. It was a purely ideological thing,” Mann says. “Now it’s a bit like ‘Groundhog Day’. We’re back to where we were four years ago.”

Within weeks, the monitoring mast will finally be installed at their preferred site, in a pine plantation about 5 kilometres from Woodend. The proposed turbines would produce enough electricity to offset the annual consumption of Woodend, Macedon and Mount Macedon combined.

“Just because our project was banned didn’t mean we would disappear, because we know it’s got too many benefits for locals,” Mann says. “I think most Australians get the fact that climate change and cheaper renewable energy aren’t going away.”

The Andrews government has promised to scale back tough planning restrictions on wind farms. Under the changes, only residents living within 1 kilometre will retain the right to veto projects – down from 2 kilometres. The planning minister, rather than local councils, will be responsible for deciding applications.

The controversial wind turbine “no-go zones” – which include the Yarra Valley, the Mornington Peninsula and the Great Ocean Road – will stay, but community-owned turbines in the Macedon region will be exempt.

Planning minister Richard Wynne says he expects to receive final advice on the planning amendments within a fortnight.

“We want to encourage more of these community wind farms, because this is about communities taking ownership of climate change in a very practical way,” he says.

The outlook is not so promising for large-scale wind farms. Kane Thornton, CEO of the Clean Energy Council, says that while the industry is pleased the planning rules will be relaxed, investment in big projects has stalled, pending a decision on the federal Renewable Energy Target.

The Abbott government has yet to announce its stance on the RET, after its review panel recommended the target be reduced. Subsequently, a further review by the Climate Change Authority recommended the target be maintained.

“The RET is the main driver to investment and, at the moment, the biggest barrier,” Thornton says. “Until the federal situation is resolved we’re not going to see a big rush in large-scale projects in Victoria.”

Leigh Ewbank, from Friends of the Earth’s “Yes to Renewables” campaign, says that if the federal government continues to hold back investment, state policies should fill the gap. The ACT government has legislated a 90 per cent renewable energy target for 2020.

“The ACT policy is driving construction of renewable energy projects,” Ewbank says. “Victorian policy makers can take similar action.”

The Victorian Liberal party appears to have had a change of heart under the leadership of Matthew Guy. For the first time, the state has a “shadow minister for renewables”, David Southwick. He says Victoria has the opportunity to be a leader in renewable energy. “We want an industry that can deliver more clean energy and clean energy jobs.”

Southwick says his party is seeking a “positive outcome on the Renewable Energy Target that supports local jobs in Victoria”.

Read an edited version of this article at The Age online

Reviving the race on a cleaner Yarra

In Environment, The Age on

LAST year, Matt Stewart rode along the Yarra every morning, from his home in South Yarra to his work at Melbourne University. As he pedalled, he wondered about the condition of our river. Could it be improved?

He began researching the Yarra’s urban history. “I found a story from 1932 which spoke about an iconic race where 100,000 people lined the banks,” he says. “It was the biggest open water swimming event in the world.”

With a group of friends, Stewart resolved to revive the “Race to Prince’s Bridge”.

Their organisation, Yarra Swim Co, is aiming for the race to begin again next year. “It’s ambitious,” he says. “We want to inspire people to see the river as a place for recreation, where we can swim permanently in the future.”

The 3-mile swim was first held in 1913, from the Twickenham Ferry – now the site of the MacRobertson Bridge, in Burnley – to (the then) Prince’s Bridge, near Flinders Street Station.

Coburg swimming club members who took part in the 3-mile swim, c1937. Coburg Historical Society.

In 1929, it set a world record for the number of competitors and 100,000 people lined the banks to watch.

Footage of the 1932 race is on YouTube: a reporter asks the female winner of the race – “Miss Gill, of Hawthorn” – how she found the Yarra. “Pretty dirty!” she laughed.

The Race to Prince’s Bridge ran annually until 1963, when it was cancelled because of concerns about water quality. The race was revived, and then canned again, in the late 80s.

During summer, the EPA and Melbourne Water monitor water quality in the river and display the results on the Yarra Watch website. This week the water was suitable for swimming at Kew, Warrandyte and Launching Place in the Upper Yarra. It is illegal to swim in the Yarra downstream of Gipps Street, in Abbotsford.

For the last three years, Dr David McCarthy, from Monash University, has been studying the microbes in the river that could affect human health. His research won’t be complete for another year, but he says water quality deteriorates after rain, when stormwater flows into the river, bringing contaminants from our streets. In very heavy rains, the sewer system overflows into the waterways.

Dr McCarthy says one long-term solution to poor water quality is better stormwater treatment – to capture and treat rainfall where it lands, before it is released into the environment.

The Labor government has proposed new legislation, the Yarra River Protection Act, to guard against overdevelopment along the river’s banks.

Yarra Riverkeeper Andrew Kelly says the new approach must be broader than planning alone. “The river falls on the edge of many people’s responsibilities but not right in the centre for anyone.”

He is hopeful that the new wave of interest in the river will help the Yarra’s cause. On Facebook, 13,000 people have promised to take part in an “inflatable regatta” on the last Saturday of March. The blow-up boats will launch at Abbotsford and land at Bridge Road in Richmond.

Read this article at The Age online

Interview with Kevin Anderson

In Environment on

LAST weekend, the G20 leaders agreed to increase economic growth by an extra 2 per cent or more. It’s a strange promise – if it was in their power to increase growth by that much, I’m sure they would have been doing it anyway.

It’s also strange because of the troubling relationship between economic growth, as we know it, and carbon dioxide emissions.

So with those conundrums in mind, here’s an edited version of an interview I did early this year with climate scientist Kevin Anderson, from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester. I interviewed him for a newspaper article that was scrapped before I’d even finished my research, so I never got to write it up.

Anderson wrote a blog late last year stating that if we’re to keep a good chance of staying within 2 degrees warming, rich countries need to cut emissions by up to 10 per cent per year. Reductions of that magnitude are likely to require economic contraction, or degrowth – at least temporarily.

I asked him about that blog:

KA: It caused quite a stir. Almost everyday I get someone responding. I think it’s opened a dialogue which I think was being held back before. It came out of the climate change data and the maths are so blatantly obvious that people cannot argue against the simple numbers: the industrialised countries require degrowth strategies for 2 degrees C. There’s no way out of that.

“We have an inevitably radical future”

My own judgement now is that a lot of people don’t like the conclusions, but don’t necessarily disagree with the analysis. That is not a good enough reason not to have it as part of the debate.

This ties into an already existing language and literature, whether it’s from ecological economics or Herman Daly with his steady state economics and so forth, there have been a lot of people talking about these things for decades. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to get ripped to shreds by people for even discussing it. That still happens, but nevertheless, I think there is now sufficient momentum to allow it to actually become part of the discussion – although very much a minority part of it.

MG: Your carve up of the carbon budget requires rich countries to cut emissions deeply – by 8 to 10 per cent per year.

KA: The important thing about those reduction rates is that they work if we start doing it immediately. Ideally we should have started some little time ago. It’s a few years out of date, but we know that we’re always further along the line than we were when the data ended. Every year we fail, that percentage rate goes up.

MG: And of the rich countries, Australia would be at the upper end of that scale, given its high per capita emissions?

KA: I think you can make quite a good set of reasoned arguments as to why some of the high emitting countries on aggregate – the US, Qatar, Australia – would have to do more than the others. Australia would be at that end, at least.

MG: One reason the rich countries need to cut emissions so fast is that you assume China will peak later – in 2025 – than most of the other modelling does, including that by the Climate Change Authority here in Australia. Is that unrealistic? Do we need China to do more to cut emissions than you’re suggesting?

KA: Realistic is a word we use that applies to the thinking of the last century. We hear that all the time: ‘This is clearly impossible.’ Well, oh fine, we’re in an impossible world now. Can we deal with 3, 4 or 5 degrees C? Well almost certainly not in any reasonable fashion. Can we mitigate for 2 degrees C? Well if we have the same mindset, then certainly not, either. In that sense, I would argue the future is impossible. It’s unrealistic.

We should have done something about that earlier. But we are where we are now and we have to think differently. The argument I often make is that we have an inevitably radical future. Now, whether it’s radical because we’re doing radical mitigation and we have some control over the levels of climate change we are going to see, or whether it’s radical because we just carry on doing what we do now and we have to reap the repercussions of rapidly changing climate, both of them are radical futures. Both are unrealistic with the current mindset.

On China – I think it’s more realistic to say the wealthy parts of the world should be looking to radically reduce their emissions rather than to expect China to peak before 2025. You have to bear in mind that a lot of the emissions attributed to China and others of the industrialising countries are actually the responsibility of the west, from a consumption perspective – and I’m sure this goes for Australia, because it also imports a lot of manufactured goods.

Really, China should be permitted even longer to peak, but we cannot apply a fair and equitable system because we’ve got to the point where it is inevitably unfair and inequitable.

The historical legacy is such that Australia, the EU, the US, we still owe a huge amount because of what we’ve done. Although China’s emissions are heading in our direction now, if you look at the cumulative emissions per capita they’re much, much lower than the west, and that feeds into development and so forth. So it doesn’t seem reasonable to me to just look at instantaneous per capita emissions and then say China should be peaking earlier. They are clearly still a poor country in terms of development. Their GDP per capita is still much lower and their purchasing power parity is much lower than Australia or the EU.

MG: The world’s governments have agreed to limit warming to no more than 2 degrees. In Australia, we continue to claim that’s our aim, but we also promise very limited emissions reductions. How do we make sense of that contradiction?

KA: That same gap is occurring everywhere. The EU here has just agreed a 40 per cent reduction target by 2030. It then claims that is consistent with a 2-degree trending for the EU, which it isn’t at all. What’s required is nearer 80 per cent. We probably have more appropriate rhetoric here than you have. But the action isn’t any better.

MG: Do we have an idea of what would be necessary to reduce emissions so rapidly? What’s life like for a human in that society?

KA: It’s inevitably a woolly discussion about what that sort of future would look like. But I think you can start to hone it down a little bit in terms of the internal equity within countries. One of the arguments I’ve made repeatedly is that even within nations, the differential in our emissions is absolutely enormous.

So we are not necessarily saying everyone in the UK or Australia has to reduce at that rate. Those people who are the major emitters, they are the ones that need to make the lion’s share of the change. It may well even be, even within a country that is having rapid reductions in emissions, that some of the poorest people may still see no change or even perhaps a rise in their emissions.

The scare tactic is to say that this will apply to everyone, so even if they’re in fuel poverty, they’re going to have to cut back or see dramatic increase in the price of their fuel. As academics in the UK, we’re getting paid three or four times the low salary. It is people like us who have to make the radical changes, not the poorest 20 per cent of our societies.

MG: What kind of policy measures might be necessary to reduce emissions by up to 10 per cent a year?

KA: I think it’s unlikely you can deliver these rates of change with a price mechanism. I would go so far as to say there is no evidence to suggest it’s in any way possible with price, because the price would have to be so high. For those of us who are the main emitters, we are effectively inelastic to the price of energy. The poorer people in our own communities and the poor people globally are highly elastic to it and if the price of energy goes up significantly because of a carbon price, they will be in even more dire positions than they are today. In countries like the UK won’t be able to heat their houses or drive at all.

“We can do things that are seen to be radically different”

I think the price route is going to be re-thought. The argument we’re making is that we need a regulatory framework, maybe complemented with prices as well. From a UK perspective, that sounds like a throwback, but we have to think about regulations differently. They’re about standards, not about picking winners. It isn’t the role of policymakers to say which technology; they usually get that wrong anyway. They set the standards and say you can use whatever technology you want as long as it meets these standards.

The work we’ve done at the Tyndal Centre here with some of my colleagues has been very much at a sectoral level, without looking necessarily at the whole economy. But it does suggest there is huge potential for emissions reductions.

In the UK, 80 to 90 per cent of all kilometres are travelled by cars that are 8 years or under old. So within 8 years you can change virtually the whole fleet. That’s a very quick turnaround time. So what can you change it to? Using existing cars, in the UK there are now around 300 models available with emissions below 100 grams of CO2 per kilometre. The average car in the UK is something like 168. If you had a standard that said no car beyond 2015 that was more than 100, then you would have about a 40 to 50 per cent reduction in car emissions within about ten years. With no new technologies, no new infrastructure and no additional price in the system.

You’d get a much bigger saving in places like the US and Australia because you start with cars that are much more inefficient. That’s an example where we could carry on doing exactly what we’re doing, with existing technologies, existing skill sets, and see radical reductions in emissions. You can do it with refrigerators too. Within 8 years you could change out most of the fridges in UK homes and radically reduce our emissions from refrigeration. There are no price premiums on these things.

There are lots of reasons we’re not doing it. In the UK, it’s this old concept of choice: we cannot interfere with the market. As long as we put a label on it, people can choose what they want. And that mindset means that we cannot set standards, we cannot use a regulatory framework to drive down emissions even using existing technologies.

MG: But is efficiency enough to get the kinds of emissions reductions we need?

KA: No, nothing like it. But the demand side is really important and generally gets missed because people talk about wind turbines or tidal schemes or solar or nuclear power. They always talk about these big schemes, but they will take a long time – decadal penetration rates really.

All I’m saying here is the demand technologies penetrate the systems much, much quicker and can deliver huge savings, but only if we can overcome the rebound effect. What policies we can put in place to ensure any savings we make are not just squandered by us then using the money for more consumption? That’s really important. I think those policies will vary depending on the cultural framing of each country.

It wasn’t that long ago that we bathed once a week in the UK. We then started to shower two or three times every week. We now have power showers and people use power showers often twice a day now. We moved towards showers partly for energy reasons many years ago and actually our showers now use far more energy than our baths ever used. We’ve normalised the idea we have to shower once or twice a day, which means we have to buy more clothes, we have to wash our clothes more often, so you get a whole suite of things that build up. These practices are things that are normalised and we say we can’t change them. We need to actively think about the practice we’re embedding in our societies, particularly for poorer parts of the world who can avoid locking themselves into some of the more stupid things we’ve got ourselves locked into.

MG: We don’t seem to be anywhere near having that kind of public conversation. There are all sorts of issues with degrowth we aren’t delving into, right? Like what would happen to our debt-based financial system?

KA: I wonder if we use those things as an excuse for not having bigger discussions. We’re looking at climate change now against the backdrop in which many industrialised countries are having to do things quite differently anyway, because of the economic situation we find ourselves in.

Unfortunately, we tried to resolve what were the biggest banking issues since the 1930s with the same sets of tools that brought about the problem in the first place. We could have retrofitted every single property and to a very high level for the money we gave back to the banks. That would have helped with employment; it would have helped with reinvesting the money back into the economy; it would have helped with resilience to the changing climate; it would have helped fuel poverty. There’s virtually nothing that doesn’t get a tick on that. And yet what we did is we gave the money to the banks.

We are having to think differently in the environment we’re in today, even about our established organisations, so why not think a bit more differently about how we actually deal with these issues? When people say these things are impossible, it at least gives us a chance to turn around and say, ‘Well they weren’t impossible when we had to deal with it from a banking point of view’.

We can do things that are seen to be radically different. I think the agenda is moving. It is moving on to allow us to think about things that were previously just dismissed out of hand. Where people would once say this isn’t possible, I think now the analysis is being undertaken to say: ‘Well, what could be achieved?’

You can find more of Anderson’s work on his website. Or, see the recordings from the Tyndall Centre’s Radical Emission Reduction Conference last December.

Renewable energy: power to the people

In Community development, Environment, The Age on

Locally-owned renewables are shaking up the energy market. Will government and industry join the party or try to shut it down?

CHEWTON Primary School – student population 40 – perches on a hill above the houses of the small Central Victorian town, which borders on Castlemaine.

Before the year is out, its red tin roof will be home to solar panels facing east and west, positioned to best offset its demand. The school is crowdfunding for a renewable energy system, by way of a new scheme called The People’s Solar.

“Our savings won’t go back into the big bucket,” says principal Julie Holden. “They won’t be used for staffing and books.” She’s promising to fund environmental initiatives by students around the town instead, as well as more energy efficiency improvements for the buildings.

Modest though its goal sounds, Chewton Primary is one front in a revolution.

In a speech in mid-October, Michelle Groves, CEO of the Australian Energy Regulator, described the coming change in the electricity industry that way: “a revolution”.

“Revolutions can seem threatening at first, but they also present opportunities,” she said.

In her speech, delivered to the Energy Users Association of Australia conference, she was discussing the rise of “prosumers” – consumers of electricity who are now also producers. Over a million households have installed solar panels in the last few years, she said, and that’s a good thing: along with smart appliances and batteries, this wave of solar generation is increasing both customer choice and the resilience of the electricity network.

But she warned that if existing networks resist these new, competing technologies, “there is a risk that a significant number of consumers will ‘walk away’ from the network”.

That is, they’ll leave the grid altogether, in favour of their own generation and storage, leaving its fixed costs to be defrayed among fewer users. “This would have major consequences for many consumers and for the efficient operation of energy markets,” Groves said.

Solar photovoltaic panels are booming for good reason. They’re a consumer item of malleable meaning, alluring for stubborn individualists and climate change activists alike.

But for a growing number of people, renewable energy promises something even more: an opportunity to rejuvenate communities and create local jobs. All around the country, volunteers are planning energy systems that will be owned by their community, covering a scale from single rooftops to entire towns.

“The buzz phrase is that solar power is democratising the energy market,” says Tosh Szatow, the founder of the People’s Solar, as well as a consultancy called Energy for the People. “But the democracy we’ve got isn’t serving our interests. This is something more – it’s energy owned by people, serving interests defined by those communities themselves.”

Around Castlemaine and districts, in particular, the solar citizens are rallying.

It’s a cloudless Sunday morning at Chewton Primary. Szatow explains the People’s Solar to his audience: “If the community gives the solar panels once, those panels will give back to the community for 25 years. So we turn $8000 of donations into $25,000, or more, of reinvestment in the town.”

Szatow is wearing a blue t-shirt bearing the slogan: “Stick it where the sun shines”. The event is called “Going off the grid” and it’s doubling as a fundraiser for the primary school’s panels. The People’s Solar has already overseen the installation of community-funded panels at Taradale Primary and Castlemaine Childcare Co-operative.

The region is becoming a hotspot for grid-connected solar households. In August, over 300 residents signed up for new rooftop systems by way of a not-for-profit, bulk-buying scheme called Mount Alexander Solar Homes.

Beforehand, Castlemaine already boasted nearly double the statewide proportion of solar houses, says the scheme’s coordinator, Neil Barrett. Because the new systems are much larger than most pre-existing ones, in total they’ll lift the shire’s solar generation capacity by up to a quarter. “It’s been a ripper,” he says. “It’s employed a lot of people for four or five months. We’re taking expressions of interest for a possible second stage.”

Volunteers with another organisation, the Mount Alexander Sustainability Group, are investigating renewable generation on an even larger scale. They’re scoping a range of options, including a solar farm, small-scale hydro and biofuels generation, which would account for a quarter of the shire’s total electricity consumption. They are planning to establish their project as a co-operative, majority-owned by locals.

The group has adopted the same model used by Hepburn Wind, a community wind farm that has been generating power since 2011. Its two turbines feed enough electricity into the grid to more than match the needs of nearby towns Daylesford and Hepburn.

Taryn Lane is the community officer for Hepburn Wind. She also works for its spinoff, Embark, which was founded to help similar projects start up. Right now, she says, the best option for community groups is solar, because there are several viable models, from bulk buys and donations, to investing in powering the local pub. There are at least ten community groups across the state working on it, from the Surf Coast to East Gippsland, and fifty around the country.

The outlook for wind, however, is grim. The federal government’s decisions to scrap the carbon tax, and review and reduce the Renewable Energy Target have slashed the co-operative’s earnings.

The Victorian government hasn’t helped. Its sudden blanket ban on wind power in the Macedon Ranges (among other locations), imposed in 2011, scuppered locals’ plans for three turbines in a nearby pine plantation. Previously, the community group had received a government grant for a wind monitoring mast.

“It’s a bit of a mess isn’t it?” says Lane. “It shouldn’t be this hard.”

She argues that the state government should exempt community-owned projects from the wind “no-go zones”. It should also introduce a state-based renewable energy target and establish a feed-in-tariff for community-owned solar – policy measures that have already been adopted in South Australia and the ACT.

But as the state election approaches, there’s no sign of change. In mid-October, the Napthine government released its energy policy. Renewable energy wasn’t listed among its seven priorities. The state Labor party has promised to review the wind no-go zones and other planning restrictions, and also, to expand renewable energy, but hasn’t announced how it’ll do so.

North of the Murray, the signs are more encouraging. The New South Wales government, also Liberal, has emerged as an unlikely champion of community-owned energy.

Last Thursday, Rob Stokes, the NSW environment minister, will launch the “Repower One” project, a 99 kW solar array on the roof of the Shoalhaven Bowling and Recreation Club.

He also announced a new round of grants worth $700,000 for community energy projects. Last year, the NSW government awarded $411,000 to nine different community-owned wind and solar farms.

The solar panels on the bowls club are an initiative of volunteer group Repower Shoalhaven. On the strength of countless volunteer hours, they managed to locate a profitable oasis in the regulatory morass, explains Chris Cooper, the group’s founder.

They raised $120,000 in ten days. More than half the investors are locals and Cooper says it’ll deliver them a good commercial return. The bowls club, too, stands to come out several hundred thousand dollars ahead over the life of the system.

Repower Shoalhaven is planning on doing it again and again – cuts to the RET notwithstanding. Already, they’re in discussions about rooftops on local universities, high schools, ambulance buildings and water authorities. “We hope to get another one up by Christmas,” Cooper says. “Every three months we aim to get another project out to our members and investors.”

Elsewhere in NSW, the government is sponsoring a project to establish Australia’s first “Zero Net Energy Town”. The winning town, somewhere in the northern inland region, will be announced in mid-November. It’ll be funded to develop a blueprint and business case to switch to 100 per cent, locally generated renewable energy.

The scheme’s coordinator, Adam Blakester, from Starfish Initiatives, a charity that works on regional sustainability, says the public shouldn’t underestimate the scale of projects, and the ambitions of those involved.

“Most people think community and they think cute and little,” he says. “People haven’t yet understood that this is about serious projects with serious engineering, money, law, governance and marketing. And it’s got to be one of the most professionally overqualified sectors I’ve ever worked in – it’s a long way from the lamington drive part of the community sector.”

All that knowhow goes only so far, however, because the challenge isn’t only technical; it’s also regulatory. Now, over half our electricity bills are consumed by distribution, he says, and the regulated charges are the same no matter how far the electricity travels. Local energy systems, especially in the regions, have the potential to cut those costs – if they’re allowed to.

“Until now, regulation has been about ensuring the generators and network operators don’t go bankrupt and we always have electricity,” Blakester says. “When you want to fiddle with it, you find out it’s very complex – and you bump into some of the most powerful vested interests in the world.”

Earlier this year, Blakester helped found a peak body, the Coalition for Community Energy, to help lobby for regulatory change. In June, it held a conference in Canberra. One of the speakers was Arno Zengle, the mayor of a village in Bavaria called Wildspoldsried. Last year, the village produced more than four-and-a-half times the electricity it consumed.

“In Germany there are more than 300 towns that have achieved zero net energy status,” Blakester says. “It’s like another planet compared to the centralised energy oligarchy we live in.

“Can we do it in Australia? It’s too soon to be confident the answer is yes. Technically it’s doable, but whether it’s culturally and systemically possible, well, that’s up to us.”

*

THE chasm in thinking about our energy future can be traversed in just 12 kilometres in Central Victoria, between the towns of Maldon and Newstead.

Late last month, the state government announced that Maldon, a village of 1500 residents only a short drive from Castlemaine, is going to get gas – by the end of 2017, approximately.

It’s part of the “Energy for the Regions” program, first announced in 2011. The state government’s latest tender, worth $85 million, will fund gas connection for 11 towns across Victoria by way of “virtual pipelines”. Compressed gas will be trucked to a station on the outskirts of each town. From there it’ll be distributed throughout the streets via a brand new pipe network.

The successful contractor, TasGas, a subsidiary of Brookfield Infrastructure Group, says the rollout will cover 12,500 homes and businesses.

In the middle of next year, the company will go on a “roadshow” of the towns, says CEO Roger Ingram, to explain its offer and pitch residents to connect. TasGas is still finalising its numbers, but Ingram estimates that the virtual pipeline will deliver gas 40 per cent cheaper than LPG.

Tony Wood, the energy program director at the Grattan Institute, thinks it will be a hard sell. The institute’s latest report, Gas at the crossroads, speculates that households will, if anything, begin switching away from gas. In the last 5 years, retail gas prices have risen by more than one-third, and they’re expected to rise significantly more. The wholesale price is tipped to double in the next two years.

“If gas prices go up as much as they might, a lot of customers aren’t going to connect after all. Or if they do connect, they’re going to be really pissed off. How would you feel if you connected and gas prices went up by 50 or 100 per cent in a very short space of time?” Wood says.

He describes the government’s spending on Energy for the Regions as “mindboggling”.

The $85 million amounts to a subsidy of $6800 for each house and business that could connect. But in reality, it’s much more. At the take-up rate estimated by TasGas – between 15 and 30 percent over the next decade – the government is shelling out somewhere between $22,667 and $45,333 a pop.

“I’m sure governments must have made worse investments, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head,” Wood says.

The residents of Newstead, 12 kilometres south of Maldon, want something different. For four years, the volunteers comprising “Renewable Newstead” have been working on a plan to become completely powered by renewable energy.

The group began by offering energy audits, which were taken up by 8 out of every ten residents. Then they began looking into creating a local micro-grid, fed by banks of solar panels.

“Our main interest is community building,” explains Geoff Park, from Renewable Newstead. “We’ve got the complete spectrum of views about climate change and sustainability. The number one priority for us is that whatever we do needs to add to the social capital of our community.”

Park anticipates that the scheme would offer electricity to locals at a slight discount from current prices, while also generating cash for to spend elsewhere in the community. And unlike gas, they don’t need the government to pay. A small grant would help scope a plan, but otherwise, it would be a commercial proposition.

Two years ago, when Park contacted the Liberal state government about the idea, he didn’t even get a reply. The group has had similar trouble dealing with the network distributor, Powercor.

Tosh Stzatow is advising Renewable Newstead on its plan to go 100 per cent renewable. He notes that if the money being poured into “Energy for the Regions” – $6800 per house – was spent on solar instead, it would cut an average household’s electricity bills close to zero for over 20 years.

“We really are at a crossroads,” Szatow says. “Every dollar we spend in centralised gas and electricity infrastructure takes us down a road to rising energy prices, non-renewable fuels and extractive business models.

“The other road is locally-owned and managed renewables, with stable or declining energy prices. That’s the one we want to walk down.”

Read this article at The Age online