Narara Ecovillage has reached another milestone towards sustainable living with the installation of a large solar-powered community battery and supporting smart grid.
It enables the village of 100-plus residents to generate, manage and store solar power during the day and use it at night and on cloudy days.
Co-Chair of NEV Power and ecovillage resident, Jon Ellis said that with the help of a grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), the village residents were able to connect their solar panels to the battery in December 2021 and becomes almost self-sufficient for electricity.
“We’re so excited to be able to achieve our goal to have a fully carbon neutral energy supply here in the village,” he said.
“Since the installation, an outage on the local network at night saw our homes powered by the battery while nearby residencies had a black-out.”
The village’s 300 KW of solar panels on its homes and community buildings feed surplus energy into the 437kWh Hitachi Energy battery, which gets fully charged by 11am on a sunny day.
Residents are then able to power their homes at night using battery power rather than drawing from the mains electricity network.
The village is a smart grid, with all homes and buildings connected into a micro electricity grid so they can share the solar power and battery storage.
On sunny days, solar power not used by homes and offices gets stored in the battery, and any excess is fed into the national electricity grid.
This means the village has a fully carbon neutral energy supply, helped by the fact that the village is not connected to the gas network.
NEV Power Co-Chair Dave Parris said that as the ecovillage continued to grow and new homes were built, more solar panels would join the micro grid and help charge the battery.
“It feels great to know that we’re not adding carbon emissions to the atmosphere and our excess solar energy helps the wider community access solar as well,” he said.
The launch of the battery on Friday, October 21 was attended by Federal Member for Robertson, Dr Gordon Reid and Gosford MP Leisl Tesch.
Dr Reid outlined the Powering Australia Energy policy, noting that the government would be “investing heavily in renewable energy including projects such as community batteries”.
Also in attendance was Dr Alice Howe from Central Coast Council and Leon Chanter from ARENA, who were instrumental in supporting the Ecovillage smart grid and battery implementation through a $1.3M grant.
Chanter said that community energy resources, microgrids and batteries were going to play an important role in the transition of our electricity system by supporting the grid, improving community resilience and ultimately leading to the decarbonisation of the electricity grid.
Stephen Sproul, representing Hitachi Energy who supplied the BESS and microgrid controls, said microgrids such as this were becoming ever more important because they battled climate change on two fronts by enabling the use of 100 percent clean energy locally and also add grid resiliency to protect against more frequent and extreme weather.
Source:
Media release, Oct 25
Narara Ecovillage