It’s not easy sharing your story about living and working with renewable energy, let alone fronting up as a witness to a Senate Committee public hearing.
Last week I joined two incredible farmers – Sally Hunter from Narrabri and Lindsay Marriott from South Gippsland – to present as witnesses for the Senate Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy.
Sally is a farmer and community leader who has spent the last three years trying to establish a community battery for Narrabri. Despite strong community support, this project has now been derailed because of the spread of false and exaggerated information.
Lindsay is a beef and sheep farmer who also hosts 12 wind turbines and a substation on his family property. The wind farm has been in operation for just over 10 years. Lindsay spoke about the campaigns that ran against his wind farm during the planning process, some of the scary claims that were made, and how the reality 10 years later has been so different from the claims.
I spoke in my capacity as National Director for RE-Alliance, a not for profit organisation who support the shift to renewable energy. We do this by fighting for regional and rural communities, to make sure they get the best outcomes from hosting wind, solar, storage or transmission projects.
After nearly 13 years working on the ground we have a deep understanding of how complex Australia’s shift to renewable energy is, and how false and exaggerated claims are increasingly being used to divide communities.
Of course there are a range of opinions about renewable energy in the regions, but repeated data demonstrates a clear majority of Australians in renewable energy regions support renewables.
I made my way to Sydney via a trip through the Wimmera in Western Victoria and into South West NSW. The people we speak and work with in those places – farmers, leaders of community groups and local council staff and representatives – understand the generational opportunities the renewables build out presents for their communities, but they also understand that seizing those opportunities requires a lot of hard work and the support of their communities can’t be taken for granted.
The rollout can be messy and communities have legitimate concerns that deserve to be addressed.
But one of the biggest contributors to community anxiety is not being able to easily access factual, locally-relevant and trusted information.
When there is an information void we see it filled, time and time again, by false and exaggerated claims.
Which is why our submission to this Senate Committee Inquiry recommended to the federal government that they should establish a network of Local Energy information Hubs in renewable energy regions – like New England – across the country.
Local Energy Hubs are proposed local information service centres run by councils or community organisations. Each Hub would have a team of trusted local staff working to ensure communities are genuinely seeing the benefits of renewables at all levels, from accessing bill subsidies to helping electrify farms and small businesses, to responding to large-scale projects in development.
Local Energy Hubs are not simply shopfronts or drop-in-centres. They are designed to dramatically increase the capacity and agency of rural and regional communities so they can lead the shift to renewables, incorporate a range of local perspectives and tackle challenges as they arise.
This community-led, robust solution to information integrity has been in front of the Federal Government for almost two years so we think it’s about time they got on with the job of implementing them.
Got something on your mind? Go on then, engage. Submit your opinion piece, letter to the editor, or Quick Word now.