Hume council will write to the federal government to welcome and encourage support for the introduction of more community batteries in the municipality.
Last week, council adopted minutes from a Hume Sustainability Taskforce meeting on May 10, and voted to make further correspondence with the government to indicate interest in community battery programs.
Officers’ comments in council documents said support for batteries is “an action relevant to [council’s] Climate Action Plan currently under development and will be included in the draft Plan for council’s consideration”.
“Depending on how the battery is operated, benefits of neighbourhood scale batteries can include: avoiding constraints on the amount of local household solar the grid can accept in a given neighbourhood; improving reliability in outage-prone areas; deferring or avoiding network upgrades [and] reducing energy prices,” officers said.
Officers said there is currently one neighbourhood battery in Greenvale, owned and operated by Jemena.
“This is in an area where export of household solar generation was constrained at the substation at peak times,” officers said.
“Council has supported the trial and provides a lease of land in a right of way for the battery.”
