President’s Report Oct 2026

Graeme Martin

Delivered. After 3 years, expending more than 3,700 hours of volunteer time and $770,000 we have successfully completed the final project milestone in our Neighbourhood Battery Initiative (NBI) funding grant. More importantly, we have laid the foundations for enabling our community to utilise 100% local renewable energy, aka community energy. 

I would like to thank the Victorian Government for making the NBI funds available to test innovative approaches to the renewable energy transition using community-scale batteries. We are very grateful for the support of the team in the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) as we navigated our way through many project challenges. The grant provided $750,000. Village Power provided the volunteer time and $20,000, saved from other projects and membership fees. 

A final project deliverable was the Project Evaluation Report. The report is a thorough examination of our experience. We are very pleased to be able to share this experience and learnings with others.

One of the quiet success factors for the project was access to professional project management services provided by Rob Catchlove and Laura Cacho from Wave Consulting. There is no doubt we could not have successfully delivered the project without these services. 

We have just closed round 3 for the Community Energy (CE) Program and reached our target of signing up 100 local households. You can read more about the latest cohort in Ana’s article. For all CE Program participants, keep aside the morning of Saturday 5th December for a special event.  

Finally, if you want to get a full dose of energy nerdism, book into the All Energy conference on the 28th and 29th October. I will be presenting, Harnessing Community Energy on behalf of Village Power on Wednesday afternoon. See https://www.all-energy.com.au/en-gb.html