The shared community battery by Enova Community Energy will be a 1.072 megawatt Tesla Megapack, installed at the Ausgrid substation in Heddon Greta, later this year.The project led in conjunction with Enosi and University of Newcastle, wants 500 households to get on board – 250 with solar and 250 without – to trial the community battery and trade excess solar energy.The stored energy will be distributed among households that don’t have to be geographically located close to the battery, and peer-to-peer trading will ensure every day households can access more renewable energy, at a reasonable price.“The battery is like the queen bee and the participants are the bees and the electricity flowing through is the honey, creating a network and community,” Enova Energy Project Manager Tia Tran said.“If they wanted to, they could actually store that excess solar in the battery, it will have a special tariff associated with that and be able to buy excess solar from each other,” she said.“We create a community around that sharing of energy and the battery which is pretty amazing.“We’re trying to have a storage solution to absorb that excess energy that’s being captured during the day.”It’s set to transform how neighbourhoods use and share roof top solar energy and large-scale battery storage into the future.Instead of unused solar energy going back to the grid, it provides a way of enabling solar to continue circulating among participants so that more value can be gained by all.About the size of a shipping container, the community battery will be able to power approximately 50 homes each day, based on an average usage of 19kWh per household.And some of the profits will go back into the community.“We’re all about the community so 50 per cent of the profits after tax go straight back into the community and our goal is to bring energy resilience to the community and reduce cost,” Ms Tran said.“We’re trying to reap revenue from the battery storage by trading into the wholesale market and then we feed that profit back to the community by a battery tariff.”The company’s goal to create energy resilience around all rural communities and get batteries at the end of every street. “We will be testing this to see what the best way forward is, how can the customers benefit, how can we make it work for everybody,” she added.“We’re trying to transition to 100 per cent renewable energy in the future and this is one of the things were doing to achieve that.”The “unique” pilot project – funded by the NSW Government – will be analysed and documented with outcomes shared by the University of Newcastle.Enova Community Energy CEO Felicity Stening said, “Projects like this have the potential to change the face of the electricity system as we know it”.“We’re looking forward to generating great results and leanings that can be shared with the broader community, so that the capability to generate, store and share renewable energy can start to be part of the new normal.”Household in NSW which want to register their interest in participating in The Beehive Project can do so at: www.enovaenergy.com.auIt comes as a wave of renewable energy projects and proposals are popping up across the Hunter.Origin Energy revealed plans last month for Australia’s biggest battery at Lake Macquarie power station Eraring, saying it was the next step in its plan to exit coal by 2032.In December last year, City of Newcastle received a development application for a Battery Energy Storage System, inside the Steel River Industrial Estate at Mayfield, similar to the one built by tech billionaire Elon Musk in South Australia.Meanwhile, a Queensland energy company targeting unused land, including property affected by PFAS, is trying to bring renewable energy via solar farms, to a number of locations across the region including at Williamtown, Mountview and Singleton.



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