[green town sign ‘Historic Yackandandah’ with ‘gold discovered 1852’ and ‘Indigo gold trail’ logo]
Joshua McMullen, Acting Regional Recovery Manager – Hume, Emergency Recovery Victoria: Our bushfire local community project grants program provided funding to Totally Renewable Yackandandah to purposely install solar systems and batteries in community spaces across the town.
[Image of an Indigo Shire Council logo and sign with quote ‘There’s a fork in the road, just up ahead. It’s time to choose, the path we tread’ from the song ‘TRY’ by Shane Howard and Denis Ginnivan].
[Image of a meter panel with Indigo Power and PV and battery lithium-ion labels]
Matt Charles-Jones, President, Totally Renewable Yackandandah: The work we’re now doing on energy resilience sits on the back of about 10 years’ worth of thinking about how we localise our electricity supply, still staying connected to the main national network, but actually having lots of points of local generation in storage. As an outcome of that research, we’ve selected 4 buildings, and we’ve set them up so that they’re ready to be able to deliver services during a normal extended outage or some other type of emergency – and whether that emergency is just a disruption – and COVID gives an example of that – but it could be a fire or a flood or storm and we are seeing more frequent examples of that.
[signs of 4 buildings: Public Hall; Yackandandah Primary School; Yackandandah Senior Citizens Centre; Yackandandah Community Centre]
Karen Keegan, Committee member, Yackandandah Community Centre:
What Totally Renewable has bought to Yack by way of solar, by way of batteries, by way of generators, means that when we have a significant event, our centre, is hopefully a hub that allows people to stand up quicker and so we’re talking their resilience, um post those sorts of devastating events.
Joshua: At ERV, we’re really proud to have supported this Yackandandah Emergency Readiness project. These systems are going to help build the community’s capacity and readiness for future emergencies. Community-led recovery is really at the heart of everything that we do. We try and be guided by community priorities, we work with the local councils and resorts, and we try and make sure that we help the communities grow back stronger and more resilient and stronger after major emergencies.
[Emergency Recovery Victoria logo]
[End transcript]
Updated