Yackandandah has been up and down, but now it's on the pace

The 2015 Uralla Lantern Parade. Uralla
is one of numerous communities
 addressing renewable energy directly. 

Yackandandah, like most Australian towns, has had its ups and its downs.

 One of its biggest ups was the north-east Victorian gold rush. By the 1890s our town was full of miners toiling to extract what was left of its alluvial gold. The only thing holding these folks back was an energy crisis. The miners were unable to source the power needed to sluice and dredge or crush the ore. The solution was a water race from high up on the West Kiewa river, which wasn’t the brainchild of government, or even the mines department – but rather a local man.

John Wallace, a Yackandandah resident, recognised a problem that needed immediate action and set about solving it.

Many people living outside of Australia’s cities are now observing a new energy crisis and, once again, it is from within these small communities that solutions are emerging. While policy makers dither and draft lifeless strategies, those outside of the political bubble have no time to waste as they already face the realities of climate change on a daily basis. With every hotter month, with every failing crop and with an ever increasing bushfire threat, those who live in rural and regional Australia are desperately looking within for climate change solutions – and acting.

Read The Guardian story - “Australia's regions already have an energy crisis – and a climate of investment is the answer.”

Yackandandah builds a sustainable future around renewable energy

Y

ackandandah is one of the towns in Australia working hard on building a sustainable future around renewable energy.

Tatura - securing its energy future.

Michael Green writes about this exciting endeavour by the two in a story in today’s Melbourne Age headed: “Yackandandah's small steps to a big renewable future”.

Interestingly, the small Goulburn Valley town of Tatura is working on something similar, not identical, but a project aimed at ensuring the town’s energy supplies into the coming decades.

The Tatura community is becoming increasingly sensitive to its energy needs and limitations, and is working to create a workable energy system that with support from both government and private enterprise could be a template applicable to use in other small Victorian towns, or scaled up for larger centres.

Inspired by Yackandandah and Tatura, hopeful for Greater Shepparton

Inspired by what is happening at Yackandandah, several other small Australian towns and what is unfolding at Tatura with its Energy Transition Plan about embracing renewable energy, it seems only right that the City of Greater Shepparton should also pursue such an ideal.

What follows is a newspaper column written for the Shepparton News, (as yet unpublished for the editor has discouraged from me further opinion about climate change) which I am hopeful of seeing it in print soon – Robert McLean.

 

Shepparton was once known as the “Solar City” – it’s time to reclaim that title and consolidate our community around it.

The Goulburn Valley has for decades built its prosperity around water and sunshine to create orchards laden with fruit, become a prolific producer of milk and a dynamic dry-land farming area to become known as the food-bowl of Australia.

Conditions are, however, changing and although many of the ingredients may become increasingly difficult to source, sunshine will continue to be as plentiful.

Considering that, the City of Greater Shepparton should again embrace the title of “Solar City”, pursue it with enthusiasm and encourage broad community conversation about the idea.

Energy, where we get it from and how we use, is unquestionably going to be the prime challenge facing all individuals and communities as the remainder of this decade and the next unfold.

The opportunities for Shepparton are boundless for it is laden with a free natural resource, sunshine, and so is wonderfully positioned to become Victoria’s 21^st Century La Trobe Valley.

The City of Melbourne aims to be carbon neutral by 2020 and that will mean sourcing renewable energy; energy that can be provided by our “Solar City” from its purpose built solar farms.

Such a plan, naturally, would mean cheaper energy for all city ratepayers who, after-all would be the foundational stock-holders who would see their cheap energy rates as a return on their investment in the solar farms.

Initially this would mean a significant change in direction for the city with the reshaping of priorities to allow investment in the proposed solar farm network.

Electricity is presently drawn from the La Trobe Valley, via Melbourne, and so existing infrastructure could be employed, in reverse, to take Goulburn Valley energy to the metropolitan area.

Existing power stations in the La Trobe Valley are among the world’s dirtiest and the Goulburn Valley’s solar farms would be among the world’s cleanest power.

Beyond being a profitably and clean investment for city residents, the solar farms would provide the district with a degree of energy independence and so allow it to grow into the future with confidence that its energy needs, at least in the form of electricity, were not further damaging the environment.

With the city playing a leading role in the development of a major part of a state-wide energy chain, Shepparton would be in a powerful position to attract businesses to became ratepayers, employers and so power consumers that would benefit directly from its intimate association with an energy creator and supplier.

It is suggested that to get something you have never had before, you must do something you have never done before - we have never had energy independence before, let’s do something different and achieve that freedom.