Community Batteries: Volunteers Page
Following our community information sessions, we've built this page for many of you who expressed interest in:
Organizing and planning for a community battery in your neighborhood, and/or
Joining our team to contribute your expertise in business, finance, or operations.
We can't wait to start collaborating with you to bring community batteries to more neighborhoods and refine our business/financial/operating models. We're planning some engaging, hands-on workshops to dive into planning additional community battery sites and further explore business/financial/operating models together.
In the meantime, you can get a head start with some preparatory work and we trust you’ll find these resources helpful.
Selecting a Community Battery Site
We learned a lot during our search for a community battery site for the Noosaville grant application. We gained practical experience in identifying suitable locations and assessing them against relevant criteria, such as availability of land, environmental and physical aspects, local community support, and network infrastructure.
The Site Selection report that ZEN prepared for the grant application describes the methodology we developed and should be readily adaptable for assessing sites in the Noosa region.
The process can be summarised
Find the Energex distribution transformers (padmount or pole mount)
Check if there is suitable land adjacent to the transformer
Identify houses that are served electricity by a transformer
Count solar panels on every roof within the catchment area to determine the penetration and amount of solar that could charge the battery
Confirm with Council if identified land could be used
Confirm with Energex if a connection agreement for a community battery could be pursued by lodging a Preliminary Connection Enquiry for our preferred site
Check against other criteria including noise, access, visual amenity, flood maps, other Noosa Plan overlays, disturbance of existing vegetation, and suitable distances from houses, playground equipment, roads (minimise risk of collision), etc
You can read the report here…..
Engaging the local community to gauge their support
We’re talking about Community Batteries, so it would indeed be strange to pursue a location that didn’t have strong community support. Installing and operating a Community Battery in a location should have a social licence from the residents that are served by the battery.
ZEN engaged with the residents in the catchment areas for the shortlisted community battery locations for the grant application. The methods that we developed should be able to be used as a model for how to engage in other potential locations for community batteries.
Here’s an outline of the process we used:
prepare a brochure and map for the proposed area, and a website page for further information, and an online survey
contact all residents either by door-knocking or leaving the brochure
the prime purpose of making contact is to advertise a community drop-in session in the local park for more detailed discussion and question and answer
collect contact details to enable followup
ZEN wrote a Community Engagement Report which included how ongoing community engagement would be done. You can read the report here…….
Deeper Dive
The hands-on workshops we’re planning will go into more detail and guide you through the process we used. It will be beneficial to have some familiarity with two of the mapping tools we used. Knowledge of your local area and site visits are essential as aerial maps don’t give the full story. This deeper dive section refers to a Site Selection Skills Preso document >>> open here.
Noosa Council Mapping Services
Noosa Council mapping services can be found here - https://www.noosa.qld.gov.au/community/mapping Other Councils will have similar services, eg https://www.sunshinecoast.qld.gov.au/Development/Development-Tools-and-Guidelines/Sunshine-Coast-Mapping-MyMaps
From the NOOSA PLAN 2020 section, click the Noosa Plan 2020 hyperlink
At the bottom left corner, click ADDRESS SEARCH to go to your area of interest. The property will be outlined in red. On the right hand side in the panel LAND PARCELS you’ll see various classifications about the property.
If you more your mouse/pointer to the left boundary of the map, a panel will pop out which is titled MODULES and LAYERS. Here you can change the MODULE selection from Noosa Plan 2020 to Property Recreation Utilities, which will then show parkland in green. Move around your neighbourhood. You can also make changes to the LAYERS such as turn on Contours
Look up and live
Energex and other Network Service Providers have a mapping service which show where overhead and underground electricity cables are located. See lookupandlive.com.au
We use this service to determine where distribution transformers are likely to be, and then to determine the properties that will be served their electricity from a distribution transformer, ie the catchment area. Screenshots are shown in the Site Selection Skills Preso document.
In the top left corner you can search for an address.
We’ll then change some settings to make the job easier.
On the right hand side of the top menu bar, click on the first icon - the one with 4 squares. This should show the Basemap Gallery. Click Open Street Vector Map, then close that window.
On the right hand side of the top menu bar, click on the third icon - the one with 3 stacked squares. Click on the search icon to the right of Layers. Where it says “Type a keyword” enter “Energex”. Deselect(untick) the entries “…….Network Label”
Blue lines show 11kV cabling and pink lines show Low Voltage(230/415V). Solid lines represent overhead amd dotted lines show underground.
In the Layer List panel which should still be displaying, ENERGEX LV Network & ENERGEX HV Network means overhead low voltage(230/415V) and 11kV cabling. Energex LV Cable & Energex HV Cable means underground low voltage(230/415V) and 11kV cabling.
You can select / deselect the HV or LV Network or Cable, as this makes it easy to see where the low voltage cabling connects to the HV(11kV) cabling. There should be a distribution transformer at these points. With the HV layer turned on, and by zooming in, you can see the connection point.
From a site inspection you’ll be able to see either a pole transformer or a padmount transformer. Refer to the images in the document.
Adjust the zoom levels and you should be able to identify the houses where a low voltage cable(pink) runs along the streets and often the connection points to the houses. This should assist in drawing a catchment area for a distribution transformer.
Ideally there will be some (Council) land adjacent to the distribution transformer where a community battery could be located.
ARENA Grant Funding
The October 2022 Federal Budget provided $200 million for the Community Batteries for Household Solar budget measure to deploy 400 community batteries across Australia. Of this, $171 million was allocated to ARENA to deliver at least 342 batteries. ARENA has allocated $120 million for Round 1 and intends to allocate remaining funding to a second Round to accommodate projects that have longer development times. This funding round opened on 4 April 2023. The ZEN team will be working on how we can best respond to take advantage of this opportunity.
Read ARENA’s media release here….
Full details of the ARENA grant funding can be read here…..
Other references
You can also check out these references:
Read our Noosa Community Batteries Newsletters and News Items.
Check out some of our Noosa Community Batteries posters
The Yarra Energy Foundation are leaders in the field of Community Batteries and have a really informative website.
Read two of the documents we wrote for the Noosaville grant submission - Preliminary Community Engagement for Noosaville Report, and Noosaville Site Selection Report.
The Neighbourhood Battery Knowledge Hub is an initiative of the ANU Battery Storage & Grid Integration Program together with the Victoria Government Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action.