What’s been happening at Village Power?
You haven’t heard from us for a while, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy!
Over the last 12 months, we have been developing our business model. How can we realise our vision of more people generating energy from solar panels, consuming it when needed, sharing with others and have a positive impact on the grid network? The heart of our thinking is a community scale battery that would be a viable alternative to households purchasing their own expensive batteries.
The business model we developed is based on a subscription model, a battery as a service, if you will. Our number crunching uses a modelling tool developed by Frontier Impact Group for Village Power and indicates that at scale this is feasible. We were fascinated to learn recently that an almost identical model was implemented earlier this year in Perth’s outer southern suburb of Port Kennedy. The location was partially chosen because of the rapid uptake of solar panels. The WA Government is now integrating this model into their energy future with the recent Electricity Industry Amendment Bill 2019 and their Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Roadmap, and WA now have five community batteries. Clearly they get it!
However, West Australia’s electricity grid is largely state owned, but over here the regulatory and commercial energy environment in Victoria is different with a complex market made up of a mix of regulated and unregulated private businesses. This presents a challenge for the community battery model.
A key element for our business operation is a relationship with an energy retailer so that we can trade energy through them. The second element is a platform to track the supply and consumption of energy from households to and from the grid and the consumption and supply by the community battery. Earlier this year we achieved major milestone by establishing agreements with two innovative companies that provide these services. These relationships will help us to explore and better understand how to operationalise the business model.
In March we had our first public outing with a stand at an Alphington Twilight market event. It was great to talk to people about Village Power and start our campaign to better understand people’s energy needs through a survey. However that was the first and last of the Twilight events with Covid kicking in. We would still appreciate learning about household energy use and any interest in joining our services when it becomes available.
Our next major challenges include lobbying for changes to regulations, funding and learning more about household energy needs. As we have all learnt living with Covid, we need to stay focused on our goal and continue to move forward, whatever the challenges.
The greatest power we have is community – so please contact us if there are people we should talk to (including potential funders, or commercial partners) and please pass this newsletter on to anyone you think may be interested. We can only change the power system by harnessing the power of community.