What is involved in setting up a community battery?

Graeme Martin, founder of Village Power, talks to Wendall from Modo Energy about what it takes to set up a community battery and what Village Power have learnt along the way.
Edits in italics by Rob Catchlove.
This is an excerpt from the Modo Energy podcast on 25 June 2025.

Wendall: Graeme, what is involved in setting up a community battery?

Graeme: there’s a lot of community groups who want to do this (install a community battery) so the process starts first of all with having a vision. What is it you are trying to achieve? What is that battery going to enable you to deliver for the community? What is the outcome? It’s not about implementing a battery; it’s about the outcomes from that battery. So once you’ve got a vision you then really need to identify and start building relationships with all the key players and those key players are going to be funders, often represented by politicians. They’re going to be your distributed energy provider because you’ve got to be connected to the electricity distribution network; they are going to be the holder of the land and that’s typically local government; and finally of course it’s going to be the community. What do all of these different stakeholders want? And also another stakeholder is the potential retail partners; how is this going to work for them?

You need to actually understand what all those parties are looking for because ultimately you’re looking for a win, win, win, win, win - a five way win if you like; something that’s going to work for all those parties. Those relationships are important, as is the clarity in what everyone needs and wants from a community battery.

You then need to actually critically examine whether you have a viable business case? Is this feasible? You needed a feasibility study and that feasibility study needs to consider your business model. How is this going to work? How is it actually going to deliver value? How’s it going to deliver revenue? Where are you going to put this battery, specifically a site, and why that site? What are the reasons that say that’s the best site? It’s going have to look at the overall costs for this and not just the cost to implement the battery but also to maintain it. Then there’s a really important question about roles and responsibilities. If the battery catches fire at 4am Christmas morning, who is going to get up and go out there and deal with it?

You’ve got to actually answer all those things in your feasibility (study). … You are then going to be ready to actually apply for some funding, and then implementing that funding in terms of signing up a commercial partner who’s going to purchase and implement the battery. There’s questions about battery technology but they are down the track and need to be resolved at that point. You need to get a connection agreement. You need to start promoting this to your community. You can launch it. Importantly, once you’ve got the battery in, that’s when the real work starts because that’s when you start to deliver on those benefits - that’s when you start to realise your vision, and you need to reflect on wherever you’ve landed.

Wendall: Throughout that process, where do you see the biggest hurdles?

Graeme: I’ll speak particularly from a community viewpoint of view. One of those hurdles is the sort of the tension between the idealism of what you want to achieve and the pragmatism and the commercial realities. You are unlikely to achieve absolutely everything you want because of course it’s got to be commercially viable (or viable with an external grant for the capital); it’s got to be viable - just as as you as an organisation have to be financially sustainable - so that’s certainly a tension.

Then if you’re relying upon volunteers then of course there’s a lot of energy goes into this. There’s a lot of time and you’ll no doubt have volunteer burnout so you need to be constantly refreshing your volunteers. This process inevitably takes much longer than you think. I started this process, to do some good, and in this case it's been 8 years and we are still not there yet.

You also need finances and it’s not just about the cost of the battery. From a community point of view, you have costs in terms of getting legal and technical advice; you need professional indemnity insurance; your funder may have some quite rigorous project management requirements that might require funding. You may need some kind of buffer in terms of risks and you’ll need to do reporting so there’s a whole series of things you need to consider in terms of costs.

So there’s lots of things and I think the critical hurdle as a community group again is to listen and learn and be collaborative throughout that process.

Reference for full podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZfl1-4gBok