Community charge

Yarra Council’s Community Charge project is a cutting-edge initiative demonstrating how buildings across Yarra can be utilised to quickly increase the amount of clean, renewable energy being locally generated and used by our community.

With support from the Victorian Government’s 100 Neighbourhood Batteries program, Council deployed 162 kW of solar panels and 360 kWh of batteries across four community buildings including Alphington Park Pavilion, Fairlea Reserve Netball Complex, Fairfield Park Pavilion and Mark Street Hall. 

These buildings don’t use much daytime electricity, but now night electricity usage for field lighting and space heating/cooling will come from energy that was captured from solar during the day. The batteries will primarily be used to export renewable energy into the local electricity system during times when demand for electricity is high.

Each building will generate revenue from selling electricity into the local electricity system when prices are favourable. Savings will be distributed annually to local community groups through Yarra Community Grants.

Council partnered with SwitchDin to provide the optimisation intelligence that unlocks the full value of the project's solar and battery investments. By releasing stored renewable energy back to the community during periods of high demand, this reduces reliance on fossil fuel generation, increases access to renewable electricity and directly supports Yarra’s goal of a shift to one hundred percent renewable energy.

With the Community Charge project, Council wanted to demonstrate and test a new potential approach to community energy resilience. By using commercial and industrial rooftops already available across its municipality, Council is hoping to demonstrate an accessible, scalable and replicable model for councils across Victoria and Australia to increase local renewable energy generation and battery storage.

Yarra is working for you to show how rooftops can be used to enable 100% renewable energy for us all.