Contributor
So far Melbourne is the first city within Australia to have all of the council infrastructures now powered by their renewable energy. Melbourne has now switched all of its renewable energy on the 1st January. Their power is supplied via the Crowlands windfarm that is located close to Ararat. This has been funded through a power purchase agreement that the Melbourne city and 13 other renewable energy institutions have.
We now see Australian buildings like gyms, libraries, childcare centres being powered fully by the renewable energy. This goes for all the streetlights as well. Of course, there are also attempts to produce self-powered public facilities. A while ago, the city of Melbourne and other big cities in Australia set up solar powered bins along their respective CBDs. These bins were able to press the rubbish together, allowing them to hold 8 times more rubbish than regular rubbish bins. The fact that they were self-powered shows how serious Australia is towards utilising renewable energy sources.
Port Phillip, the yarra and the Moreland councils along with the Bank of Australia, Melbourne University, Australia Post, Federation Square all zoos Victoria, Melbourne Convention were all part of the group buying their new energy contracts. This group has an agreement to buy 88GWh of their electricity each year and half of that will come from the Crowlands windfarm.
The agreement states that 40% of all the power will be purchased from a fixed price and then the remainder 60% is market based pricing that will be negotiated every two years.
It was funded in the part by efficient measuring which incudes a 16m upgrade to the city’s streetlights heading into LED lights. This is estimated to shave off around 1m a year from the council’s power bill once everything has been completed.
It seems the Mayor of Melbourne Arron wood stated that moving towards a 100% renewable energy is the best new year’s resolution to have. They were in the first group within the country to bring in the renewable energy power purchasing agreement.
We are leading the nation by responding to the climate change in order to secure a sustainable energy supply to go into the future with and we have seen a great example with a major city with a price tag of 92 billion economy can be influenced by the positive outcomes.
Not only the energy come from the construction of the wind farm, but 140 regional jobs have been created and eight maintenance jobs that are ongoing. That isn’t all. There are further plans for the MREP also. We are leading by an example with a groundbreaking project that will aid in facilitating the power purchase agreements for all business across the city. This will grow the investment into new renewable energy which is by far the cheapest cost to build a new electricity generation. Its great for the economy, good for the environment, creates new jobs and helps to manage energy cost growing into the future.
With over 40 of the large scale solar and wind projects underway and in the planning structure approval within Victoria as well as 26 that are already creating the electricity. Once again, an increase in jobs for a significant total 6,000 jobs.
Victoria is on track to exceeding the renewable targets of energy for creating 25% of the state electricity needs all from renewable sources by the year 2020 and 40% by the year 2025 which is causing a fair few environment groups saying that a target of 50% in 2030 is not strong enough.
The future is growing and it seems it will continue to grow produce renewable energy in Australia and create more energy engineering jobs, or help any other jobs that are directly related to the industry, to grow in the future.