Empowering the community to develop and run its own locally controlled, environmentally responsible, and financially successful renewable energy programs. Our vision: To have a viable renewable energy program operating by 2020 that is embraced in practice and financially by the Gloucester community.
Aims of the program:
To assist Gloucester to use energy more efficiently and reduce costs.
To provide clean, affordable renewable energy sources for residents and businesses.
To improve community cohesion through improved prosperity.
To increase the diversity of enterprises using renewable energy and create job opportunities.
To add social capital in the community.
Energise Gloucester launched on 17 Nov 2016. It was fantastic to welcome over 90 people to our launch event in the Neighbourhood Center on the evening of Thursday 17 November. It was very pleasing that over 40 people signed on as members. Thank you to the Bucketts Way Neighbourhood Group for the use of their facilities for the launch. This was significant as we are working with the Group to undertake our first project. We hope that this will result in a solar system being installed on the Centre’s roof. This will enable them to reduce their electricity costs via an Energise Gloucester system. More about this soon!
We were pleased to welcome our two guest speakers Tom Nockolds and Mark Squires who provided us with very valuable information on the situation with electricity charges and feed-in tariffs after 31 December 2016. Tom Nockolds is the Marketing and Communications Director, Community Power Agency; and Mark Squires is the Senior Team Leader, Resource Efficiency, NSW Office of Environment and Heritage. The key message of their talks was what to do after the 20 and 60 c/kWh feed-in tariffs expire on 31 December. They emphasised that it is in your financial interest to maximize the use of the electricity that you generate at the time you are generating it during the day. They provided many examples of how to do this. We will be including much of this information in future issues of the Energise Gloucester newsletters. They also spoke about how to go about deciding whether to invest in a battery system. More information about this soon too!
The information that they talked about is contained in the following websites mentioned by them.
• www.cpagency.org.au/
• www.energymade easy.gov.au
• www.resourcesandenergy.nsw.gov.au/energyconsumers
• www. solarcitizens.org.au