After eight years of volunteer effort and what Village Power president Graeme Martin describes as a game of snakes and ladders, the Alphington community battery in Melbourne’s inner north is finally live on the grid.
But for the community group behind it, the bigger achievement may be exposing why community-led energy projects remain so difficult to deliver in Australia.
Village Power’s experience has prompted a call for electricity distributors to reveal how much electricity local communities already generate and consume locally. They say that would better recognise the value of community batteries and other consumer energy resources.
The proposal comes as the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) finalises new rules requiring distributors to provide much greater transparency about the operation and future needs of their local networks.
Village Power supports those reforms but argues they should go one step further.
