Welcome, everyone, to 100 Climate Conversations and thank you for joining us. Today is number 34 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time climate change. We’re recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899 it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system into the 1960s. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands on which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We respect their Elders past, present and future, and recognise their continuous connection to Country. I’m Paddy Manning, journalist and author, most recently of a book called Body Count How Climate Change Is Killing Us.

Taryn Lane is a community energy development practitioner and researcher who manages Australia’s first community owned cooperative wind farm, Hepburn Energy, located at Leonard’s Hill, south of Daylesford in Victoria. Lane is a founding director of RE-Alliance and founding advisor to the Coalition for Community Energy, which has over 100 member groups across the country. We’re so thrilled to have her join us today. Please join me in welcoming Taryn. Taryn, where does this story start for you? How did you get involved in the first place?

It started for me back in 2010, so I had recently moved to the area Daylesford, off the back of working in international development for about seven years, mainly in East Timor. And I met the founders and the board at that time, and they liked my skill set and thought that I could be useful for the co-operative, I guess because I have a community development background. So, to support the wind farm as it was being developed. Then when it was built and helping to work out what our community benefit program would be, what our retailing would look like, how we engage the community. So yeah, I think I thought that my skills were appropriate at that time. So, they made a job for me and I’m still here going on 13 years.

Can we start with Hepburn Wind? And yeah, we’ll come to the name change to Hepburn Energy because there’s a good story there, but it actually begins with a community backlash against a wind farm, doesn’t it? In 2005.

Yeah, absolutely. So, we’ve got a really long story and many, many hands came together to create and build the wind farm as well. And I’m one of those, but there’s been many hands that have taken part. And so, in 2005, around about 20 kilometers from where the wind farm is built now, there was a large-scale wind farm proposed, and this was very early on in the days of renewable development, and there weren’t many wind farms that had been built in Australia at that time.

So, it was very much a new concept, and it was the first time anything beyond kind of rooftop solar had been discussed more broadly in the community. And there was a town hall meeting run by the developer and basically 90 per cent of the people that attended were really against it and a few people weren’t from our community in Daylesford, including our landowner Ron, and including our founder Per Bernard, who comes from Denmark. And I guess they were disappointed that that was the wider community’s first response. So, there wasn’t sort of a negotiation or how could we make it better or how can we make it more appropriate? And so, Per came away and started considering a model that he knew in Denmark where he had immigrated from, which had been operating since the late 70s, which was about cooperative ownership of smaller scale wind farms that were more designed to meet the local energy needs of a community. And so, a small group that attended that meeting started to have little meetings. And Ron, our farmer, was also attending because he had a hill and at that time you were quite restricted –

Not all of us have got a hill.

No, you know, at that time you were quite restricted where you could put a wind farm, you really needed a site that was above 700 meters above sea level, and he had a hill of 770 meters. Now it’s different because the turbines are so much bigger, so you really don’t need that level of height. But he knew he had a hill, so they all started talking and then a developer came to support them and put up wind testing units across three sites in the Shire. And in the end Ron’s site did prove to be the best one and so Per literally started having a table on the side of the street, having conversations with people about this model of couldn’t we build our own wind farm and do it ourselves and own it and benefit from it? And it took off.

There was at that time an active misinformation campaign, and we’ve talked about that in this series against wind energy and wind farms. The dreaded wind turbine syndrome. Did you find that that misinformation was prevalent and how did you combat it?

Yeah, absolutely. I would say not at that kind of concept point of 2005, but really the 2009 through to 2011 period was when it was at its height and it was front page news across all the newspapers, and it was a really well-resourced campaign. So, there was funding going in to bring speakers across from South Australia. They were doing town hall meetings all across the region, including in our community and really just building up that fear and at that point in time we didn’t have science and research and data to dispel it, so it got legs. It really got a lot of currency in our community and in lots of the surrounding communities as well, because we’ve got a high wind, you know, sort of area across the region. So, there were lots of wind farms either under development or being considered.

So yeah, it was pretty toxic. But I think we did a whole range of creative things to try and manage it from every week during construction we would do a myth busting commentary in our ad about what construction was happening that week. We would have a little bit at the side that was like myth busting, and we just listen in the community or ask our members or people to just let us know what are the concerns and what are people talking about. But I think primarily just having a local presence and having so many local people engaged and owning the farm really means that most people are connected to someone who’s benefitting from it.

And you actually moved right next to it, didn’t you?

Yeah, absolutely. Like when it was constructed, because there was so much, I guess, fear around wind farms and health and the noise impacts. Myself and the site manager, Tracy, we both moved into a house that was 700 meters away and I stayed there for three months, but Tracy stayed there for 12. We were there and experiencing it and able to have real conversations with people that were based on reality of what was going on.

How much of the objection to the original Clarks Hill proposal was to do with the nature of the development and the fact that it was a for-profit business? I mean, does the community owned model negate some of those concerns?

Yeah, absolutely. There is a strong kind of movement within the area around democratic participation, relocalisation, local benefit cooperatives. There is an ethic there and different projects that have been developed along that that aren’t renewables, projects that are just kind of projects or programs out in the community. So yeah, I think that local control and local kind of autonomy and self-sufficiency. So, taking responsibility for your patch and not just drawing all the electricity from the Latrobe Valley where its coal fired power. You know, all of that was a really big deal early on for the community.

Was it a slow grind getting people to join? I think we’ve got now got more than 2000 members. Yeah. Or did it take off pretty quickly? I mean, what were they motivated by? Was a price or that sense of autonomy or community spirit or?

I mean, look, every couple of years we survey our membership base and ask them the same question again of like, why did you invest? And like, has it changed now, you know, what you think about your investment? And consistently it’s the same answer, which is great, which basically prioritises common good, reducing emissions, taking action on climate change, doing something for the community, and then comes return on investment or financial kind of outcome. So yeah, very kind of altruistic drivers in the local community. Absolutely.

But at the same time, it’s not a charity, is it?

That’s right. Absolutely. And they want to make a return on it. They’re willing to receive lower returns than a commercial project. But yeah, they want to see it be successful and they want to also see it deliver strong benefits to the community beyond just what the turbines are doing. So, we have a whole range of benefit sharing programs and community projects that help people reduce emissions as well.

How much do they put in? Like, how much are you asking people to get their own energy independence for their community? What does it cost?

So for the original investment for the wind farm and this is still current today, we wanted to make it really accessible for locals. So, it was a minimum investment of $110 for locals and then a minimum of $1,100 for non-locals. And so, we’ve got a minimum threshold of 51 per cent local. So, we kind of it kind of crossed that boundary and we’re way higher than that. So that’s fine. But what it meant was having that $110 was that lots of grandparents or aunties and uncles, you know, invested for their nieces or their grandchildren. We’ve actually just been doing a like a bit of a review of all the members that have turned 18 that were miners, because now they can vote. We were like, oh, we should relook at that now because a whole lot of our membership will have matured and be eligible to vote now. So, they’ll get their new member packs and those sorts of things.

Right.

I should say the average investment was about $5,000 on average.

I came and visited you and you showed me kindly the two wind turbines that were built. You got financed from the local community owned Bendigo Bank branch.

Yeah, that’s right.

So it’s kind of like a virtuous circle, isn’t it?

Like we as much as possible, we try to consider the whole kind of supply chain and local procurement through everything. So, whether it’s, you know, the construction for the turbines, as much content that we could get within the Hepburn Shire. So, the local concreter had his biggest job ever in 40 years. And you know, the local electrician –

Building the towers?

Building the foundations for the towers, yeah. And of course, you know, bits of it you definitely can’t get from in the Hepburn Shire. Like the towers and the hubs and nacelle and the blades, but as much as possible we procure everything locally and that goes through to the finance as well. So, we have a local community bank, the Bendigo Bank, and they supported us with a $3.3 million loan which we had a 15-year term on and we paid it down in six years. But obviously that has added benefit when you’re having finance come from the local bank that also has its own community funds and does all its own community programs as well.

You were blessed, weren’t you, with a site that had good connection to the grid. But it’s also a farm. Isn’t it? It’s a working farm.

Yeah, absolutely. And so, we’re on the distribution levels so, the three levels of transmission and distribution, then low voltage, which is that street level. So, we’re on the distribution level and we did have to do a pretty significant upgrade to our local grid in order to connect. So, $1.6 million of the $13 million project was grid connection. But yeah, it is an operating farm and historically our farmer Ron used to farm spuds, potatoes. It’s potato growing country, but he’s 84 now and so when the turbines were built, he was already in his 70s and he didn’t want to farm spuds anymore. He wanted to move across to cattle, but it’s a little bit more sporadic, the income and so having the turbines there has meant that he’s stayed on the land far longer than I think he anticipated as well. And literally the footprint of the wind farm, so it’s a 300-acre farm in total the footprint is just the road and the hard stance with the turbines are. So, it’s about two and a half acres in total, so it’s a really tiny footprint.

How did you as a community decide how big the turbines, how many turbines? I mean, it’s quite a technical exercise. To generate your own energy and then can you tell us how that came to be called, Gale and Gusto?

Sure. So, there was a developer assisting the community to move through that high-risk phase and do the early development work. And part of that, I guess the site really limits what’s possible. So, the hill is kind of only big enough for two turbines, they’re 400 meters apart. The grid connection is only big enough for two turbines and the neighborhood area, like how close the neighbors are, meant that you were restricted as to how many you could place on the hill. So that’s sort of the site boundary, but then it was also about matching the local energy need. So, from where the turbines are on Leonard’s Hill through to Hepburn Springs, which includes Daylesford, we generate more than enough power for that area. So, we do over 2100 households. So, it was also about just finding that match with local consumption.

In 2011 we wanted to do a big public launch festival and formally launch the wind farm and have all the members up there. We’ve always done lots of events like picnics when the turbines were being raised and it had kind of days out at the farm, we very much see it as a community asset. So, we also thought we’d go out to the schools and get the school kids to nominate names for the turbines and thought we might get sort of 50 to 100 suggestions. But it was like literally every schoolchild in the Hepburn Shire submitted through their schools. So, the schools are just giving us these huge lists and then we had a bunch of people who were voting on the names, and it was a nine-year-old girl at the time. So, she would also be one of the kids that’s turned 18 in the past year, also will be a fully-fledged member.

So, her name was Neave and she put forward the names Gale and Gusto, which we thought were really appropriate for the two turbines. And so yeah, we were able to name them at the launch festival. She cut the ribbon around the turbines and in 2013 and then in 2015, we gave them personalities. So, they have murals on them now. Gale’s mural is 17 meters tall, and Gusto’s is 21 meters tall, and they sort of depict these anthropomorphic forms and have some bush behind them. So yeah, and I think some of that is about community connection, but it’s also at that time when there was opposition, it’s also sort of like playful activism, being a little bit cheeky and helping people to get over, I guess maybe some of the concerns that they might have. There’s been many politicians who’ve been a little bit anti wind farms who’ve come out and couldn’t resist getting a photo with the murals. So, you know, it kind of works in that regard.

So, you’re now expanding. You’re adding at the same Leonard’s Hill site a solar farm and a battery. Why are you doing that and how much are you spending and how do you make a return?

We’ve just passed planning permit to add five megawatts of solar. So, the wind turbines are 4.1. So, there’ll be more solar there and then there is wind, and the battery is up to ten megawatt hours. And you know, we’re just sort of working through exactly what model and funding structure will be deploying and looking for some of the federal government subsidies to firm up our economic viability and reduce our risk over the long term. But one of the really neat things about coupling different technologies together, particularly wind and solar, is that, you know, in the middle of the day between 11am and 3pm, the wind resource really drops down and the turbines will often kind of go off for an hour or so because there isn’t wind there. So, adding the solar, that’s it’s sort of peak time.

So, you end up just with the wind and solar alone having a 24-hour power plant, essentially. By adding a battery in the mix as well you can support the grid at different times. You can still retain energy if there’s a bushfire or if a pole goes down from a storm and a tree falling on it. So in regards to sort of local resilience and, you know, getting to more towards that 100 per cent renewable target, it’s a really significant contribution. So right now, we’re at 43 per cent renewable consumption in the Shire and we’ve got a target of zero net energy by 2025 and zero net emissions by 2030 and this will bump us up another 20 per cent towards that target. So, it’s very significant.

Yeah, it’s really grown the Hepburn Energy, the co-op model, hasn’t it? Expanding into those bulk buyer schemes, do you have to be a member to take advantage of those? Or if you’re just a local resident who’s not a member, can you still up on and get it? Cheaper rooftop solar –

Yeah. We make everything available for local residents. They don’t have to be a member, but we’ll often do kind of member deals as well. And members who don’t live in the Shire, they can still participate as well.

Is there no limit to – I mean you’ve got EVs coming, will you bulk buy?

We’ve already done our first a bulk buy in 2019 and we’ll do another one at the start of next year. So yeah, we’re just trying to tackle all the emissions spectrum or support our community to tackle them and develop programs or partner with groups who can supply or install different things and just develop them in a way – we’ve always got a social justice lens, so whatever we deploy has to be accessible, affordable, inclusive and that means like for the EV bulk buy, we partnered with a good car company who supply second hand fleet EVs. So, they’re affordable. They’re not at that kind of standard entry point. We sort of consider it like that. How do we do things in a way that’s actually going to be accessible for everyone? And then there’s some particular programs that we focus on, like vulnerable households or people who are experiencing energy stress. So, for example, an energy audit program that’s been running for the past two years, it’s been specifically for people who are from vulnerable households.

Although it’s kind of fully focused on your local area. It’s very much a kind of think global project, isn’t it? And also, national that you’ve tried to foster similar co-ops around the country. How is that going? Has any other kind of Shire or municipality around the place taken up your model?

There’s about 130 community energy groups around Australia currently that’s always growing and they’re deploying models that are best fit for them. So, some of them might be focusing on bulk buys, some of them might be focusing on a mid-scale project like Hepburn Wind is. Some of them might be doing a community battery, so they’re all doing sort of differently scaled projects, different ownership models. But yeah, what we’ve really, I think, fostered in the community energy movement, from early on is that everybody should share well. So, everything should be done under Creative Commons.

So, the intellectual properties are all completely shareable because we know that it’s hard to do and we also know that it is often replicable at some level. And so, it’s really good to just share the models freely, help communities do what they can and vice versa. I think that’s something that the whole kind of community energy movement does really well, is we’re not sort of precious about the models. We’re not a commercial actor trying to create something big that they want to have a monopoly over. We’re just communities trying to get things up and then make it easier for other communities.

You mentioned earlier the net zero emissions target. That’s seems to me a whole separate case study, actually. So, you’ve had your success at the co-op level, but now you’ve kind of expanded it, haven’t you? You’ve taken on a what I call a big, hairy, audacious goal, which is net zero emissions by 2029. So, now obviously that’s too big for the co-op to do by itself. You’ve had local and state government support, I understand, how did you get the agreement to decide on that strategy in 2018?

We’ve had the idea for a long time. So, the wind farm makes Daylesford and Hepburn Springs effectively zero net energy. And for a long time, we talked about making the whole Shire zero net energy and what would it take and what sort of studies would we need to do. And there was a model up in New South Wales, again, a Creative Commons model that had been deployed in a committee called Uralla that was called Z-Net. And so, I saw that in around about 2015 and we tried for a couple of years to get some seed funding to be able to do that model there.

And then in 2017, I had a Churchill Fellowship, and I went over to Europe and spent a lot of time in 100 per cent renewable communities through Europe. And when I came back from that, I sort of was like, well, we’ve been wanting to do this zero net energy model, which is just looking at energy, but really we should be doing zero net emissions because we don’t have the time to not. We need to actually start the big conversations now about all emissions. So not just heat, electricity, but talk about transport, agriculture, waste, land use and really start working out what we’re going to do locally around those.

So, I came back and we – with a couple of friends and colleagues, we sort of sat with that original Z-Net model and worked out how we could do it for the whole emissions spectrum. And then again, tried for a year to get funding, got knocked back twice, and then eventually sustainability Victoria supported us with some seed funding to pilot it and to work out this model on the basis that it would be freely available to other communities afterwards. So, we worked out how to do it and developed with the community a community transition plan that we released in 2019. And then we’ve been rolling out sort of dozens of programs over the past three years towards that goal of zero net emissions. But yeah, it wouldn’t be possible for the co-op. It’s very much a collaborative activity, so our council is very much in there with us in this journey. They also know they couldn’t do it alone without the partnership. Other sustainability groups in our Shire and experts as well, like we’ve got some fantastic representatives from the farming sector who are in with us with the sort of governance roundtable group.

So you’ve got a plan. It’s a 10-year document. You would be, if you achieve it, the first municipality in Australia to go net zero emissions.

So we’ve just passed stage one which was up until end of 2021 and that was really battle the low hanging fruit. So doing energy efficiency projects, doing things like the heat pump bulk buys the solar and battery bulk buys. So, it was all about what the households could do. And then starting to have some of the conversations about the trickier things like agriculture and transport. And in this stage, we’re in now is stage two, and it goes until 2025 when we’re aiming for zero net energy. And that’s all about mid-scale renewables, community batteries. So, all the projects that we’re working on and then –

And just zero net energy, does that mean 100 per cent renewable or is it?

Effectively, yeah, but it includes – it’s not just electricity, it includes heat as well. And then the final is zero net emissions, which includes all the other sectors like agriculture and transport. So, we have this sort of tiered strategy, but what we’ve found is that we’ve actually brought forward a whole load of activities that we weren’t conceptualising in 2019, but we would start to deal with until 2025. We’ve already been working on them. So, the fact that the EV bulk buy happened in 2019 and it’ll happen again in 2023, those things weren’t forecast to occur until 2026, for example.

Last year we put out an agricultural guide for how farms can reach net zero on farm, and we weren’t anticipating doing anything like that as well until 2025, 2026. We already have one electric vehicle charger that we’ve put in. We’re going to do another four this year, so then we’ll have a full EV charging network in the Shire. And again, that wasn’t something we were thinking of doing until 2026. So, I think where we’re at right now from a electricity point of view, we’re definitely ahead of where we thought it would be. And then in regards to engagement around other sectors, we’re well ahead as well.

You make it sound like, yeah, you’re going to smash it, you’re going to get there early.

I mean, I think there’ll be a kind of tipping point where the government action also starts to align on a state and federal government with where the community ambition is it. I think we saw even just in the past week, news come out from the 2005 baseline in Victoria to now they’ve reduced emissions by 30 per cent. And so, the idea that we’ve got a target of sort of 43 per cent by 2030, really we can be a lot more ambitious than that and we should be if we’re really looking at science based targets then we really need to be looking at the kind of timeline that our community has been. So, it’s not easy, but I think it’s going to be a very interesting 10 years and I think we’re going to see a lot of alignment with government programs and corporate activity as well.

A pre-condition of embarking on this community transition plan was doing a thorough, as I understand, unprecedented local level analysis of your emissions in Hepburn Shire. What are they? Are they higher than the national average, are they lower? I mean obviously there will be a higher proportion of agriculture.

So they’re not higher than average across the country. But they’re place-based and they’re bespoke. So, we did it for the Shire, but we also broke it down into Shire wards. So, the major towns effectively also have their own. So, in our Shire our major emitter is agriculture at about 43 per cent. Then we have energy and then transport and both of those are just over 30 per cent and then waste is about 3 per cent. And the reason why that’s over 100 per cent is because we also have a carbon sink in the Hepburn Shire, which is the wombat forest, and that reduces our emissions by about 11 per cent, so that already offsets quite a significant amount.

But then once you drill into the community level, they’re really different. So, Daylesford for example, being a tourism destination and when people go on holiday they want to use the spas and the jacuzzi and use lots of energy. And so, the electricity profile for Daylesford is really high, but then over in Clunes, which is a farming community, 70 per cent of their emissions are from farming because it’s large-scale farms that are out there. So, we’re not just working on the municipality level, we’re also trying to empower the communities to really understand what the big ticket items are for them.

So you won’t eliminate Hepburn Shire’s emissions altogether, but you’re confident by 2029 to be able to offset the emissions that remain.

Yeah, that there’ll be a substantial enough carbon sink to provide that.

What if you fail? What happens? The stakes are pretty high, aren’t they? You’re the first, you’re going out there, hard as a community. So, what if you fall short?

I mean, then we fall short. You know, I think all you can do is head towards the target and support people to have hope about where you’re going. I think one of the nice things that I saw after we had pretty substantial fires in March 2019 in Hepburn, and I had a whole bunch of people say that they actually – it was the first time because we’d released the plan the year before, that they didn’t feel hopeless when we were sort of in the midst of bushfires, because they were like we’ve got a plan and the community’s taking action and we’re doing stuff. And so, I think it’s as much of supporting people to have a process to take as much action as they can and to be engaged in this process as possible and to make the local environment as resilient as possible.

So, you know, currently our focus is not just on reducing emissions, which is what the Z-Net model is, but we’re looking at expanding it. So, we’ve got two project streams at the moment. One is to include or to expand the Z-Net model into adaptation. So, climate resilience and also into circular economy so that we have a more thriving local economy. So, for us, it’s very holistic. I believe we will definitely be hitting some pretty major goals in the next couple of years, and that will give the community a lot of momentum as well or a lot of confidence in what we’re doing. And again, I think the tipping point of government getting more engaged and having more programs, particularly around offsets and sort of reforestation, I think we’ll start to see a lot of support for the agriculture sector come in as well. So, all we can do is head towards it and we’ll try our best.

So if you succeed, there are more and more governments, companies embracing the idea of net zero by 2050. If you succeed, you’ll show that it’s possible, certainly in this one area to do it by 2030.

And we’ll show that it’s possible to be community led and to have social justice as the main kind of ethic in how it’s delivered. That’s the biggest thing for us is we want to be able to show that communities can do it appropriately and that it can be place based and deliver the most benefit locally.

Do you think that there’s something unique about Hepburn Shire? Do you think the lessons can be learned and equally as well applied in cities around the country?

Yeah, I mean I think it’s never a cookie cutter thing, like it can’t be cookie cutter kind of replicated, but it’s, you know, the principles around place-based transitions and fit for purpose and community programs that deal with them, absolutely. Like, you know, it might not be a wind farm. It might be a mini grid in an urban environment or a community battery or, you know, different types of technology solutions. But the ethic and the principles of communities really participating and taking leadership, I think absolutely, replicable doesn’t matter the environment.

Thank you, Taryn. Been a fantastic conversation. If you could please join me in a round of applause. To follow the program online, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com. To follow the program online, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording like this one. You can go to 100climateconversations.com and just search for 100 Climate Conversations in your pod catcher of choice.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.