President’s Report August 2026
It is alive! Our Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) is now connected to the energy grid and operating. The BESS is charging up from the local network during the middle hours of the day and discharging each late afternoon, evening and breakfast time, every day. This is community energy in action. I have to say it is immensely satisfying to know this is happening.
There is significant interest in Village Power’s work in delivering the community-scale BESS and the accompanying Community Energy Program. I recorded a podcast on our eight-year journey with Anne Delaney, journalist with SwitchedOn. You will find a link to it later in the newsletter.
Anne also wrote an article for Renew Economy on us, It took this community 8 years to get a neighbourhood battery in the inner city. But why so long?
The Renew Economy article references the submission that we made to the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) that proposed that energy distributors, including Jemena, be required to publish the proportion of energy generated and consumed in local networks, what we call Community Energy (CE%). The AEMC recently published the outcomes of their enquiry into new rules for distributors that acknowledges Village Power’s submission. There will be a subsequent review that will define specific information to be reported by distributors. We will now follow it up.
The Community Energy Program continues to attract applications. In August we held our first workshop to discuss the results produced from participants sharing their energy data. From 41 participants, we found there is an average of 67 CE%. What does that mean? Across the last 12 months from June 2025 to May 2026, our participants were generating and meeting 67% of their energy needs! That is two thirds self sufficient in supplying their own energy. 67% Community Energy (CE%). We believe that this is a vital statistic to inform the transition to 100% renewable energy. No one else is reporting this. We have been able to generate this information through the sophisticated Community Energy Reporting App (Cera) that we created with expert assistance from Allan O’Neil, a national energy market expert and Dean, a highly experienced software engineer. We also acknowledge the program participants that have agreed to share their energy data with us to demonstrate a virtual island meeting it’s energy needs. The island analogy is a simulation of a local energy zone such as the Fairfield Substation Zone.
This CE% figure is the information that we are saying that energy distributors should be routinely publishing.