TRY and Indigo Power were on the PRIME7 News with the announcement of grant funding from the Victorian Government for our first community-scale battery storage facility, Yack01.
We were very excited to learn on Wednesday that we had been successful with our application for $171,000 from the Victorian government’s New Energy Jobs Fund. TRY and Indigo Power have been hard at work since mid-2019 raising around $250,000 to bring a 136 kWh storage battery to fruition, but with the announcement of the additional funding the battery can now be increased to 274 kWh.
The storage battery facility (named Yack01 in anticipation of much more storage to come!) will be one of the first of its kind in Australia and will be installed alongside 70 kW of solar panels that are also part of the project. It will enable solar energy generated during the day to be stored and then used by Indigo Power customers during the evening. The larger battery will enable it to power up to 40 average-size households overnight.
Yack01 will be located at the property of Ben Gilbert’s Agency of Sculpture business, which is the site of the old Yackandandah sawmill and has a necessary transformer already on site. The battery is situated ‘behind the meter’ but will sell electricity into the National Electricity Market (NEM) for use by local residents.
The tracking and sharing of local energy is made possible by an energy-sharing widget developed by Mondo (a subsidiary of AusNet Services) so that Indigo Power customers with this device form a mini-grid.
The state government funding is a vital step to getting the town of Yackandandah to reach its 100% renewable energy target. We know that we not only need more renewable energy generation, but we also need storage to ensure the community has access to clean energy at all times. The Yack01 battery is a small but crucial step in the 5-stage road map to reach our target, and is the precursor to the masterplan for community-scale storage and generation being developed by our federally funded feasibility study.
We are stoked that the extra funding has allowed us to increase the battery size and really looking forward to some community-scale storage coming online in the next few months!
