Australia’s first Indigenous-owned solar farm connected to a power grid has been officially opened in a Northern Territory remote community.
The 60-member Marlinja community, located 700 kilometres south of Darwin, has built a solar farm and battery after years of planning the microgrid project with Indigenous clean energy organisation Original Power.
Marlinja resident and Mudburra woman Janey Dixon said the community had been frustrated for years about suffering frequent wet season disconnections from their nearest diesel power station at Elliott, 25km away.
“When you have electricity generated by fuel, it goes off, and we have to wait for them to come across with the boat to fix it, and it takes two or three days,” she said.
She said she was even more excited that, as well as having more reliable local electricity, the microgrid meant residents wouldn’t have to buy as many expensive power cards to run their household meters.
“We are really proud [of] what we have here at the community; we’ve got solar going in our community now without any money to pay, it’s free in the household,” she said.
Community leader Ray Dixon said the project would make a big difference to families.
“I was putting $100 a week, and some of my family were putting in $50 or $20 that would only last them half a day, or just a few hours, it was crazy,” he said.
“It will take the pressure away from families, every household in Marlinja.”
How the community did it
Original Power clean energy communities coordinator Lauren Mellor helped the Marlinja community raise $750,000 from benefactors to pay for the infrastructure.
“Any excess electricity will be used to charge the community battery, and will mean that the residents can access that for night-time use,” she said.
“When the battery runs out, then residents will flip back onto the grid, so residents will be saving at least 70 per cent on their power bills.”
Ms Mellor helped Marlinja negotiate with the NT government – which owns all of the NT’s electricity system – for permission to connect to its grid.
“It means that the government-owned power corporation will be saving on avoided diesel generation costs from the Elliott power station, so it’s a win-win for both it and the community,” she said.
But while being connected to the grid means that Marlinja can draw power when it needs extra, the community is not yet allowed by the government to sell power into it.
“We hope in the future we’ll be able to sell to the neighbouring cattle station and the local school,” Ms Mellor said.
“The project is replicable and scalable to dozens of other remote communities, and if the lessons from this project are adopted by the Northern Territory government, it means we can have a faster, fairer transition to renewable energy.”
The roadblock to Marlinja selling into the NT grid is similar to the one that has stopped four NT commercial solar farms, completed four years ago, from starting to supply renewable power.
NT Chief Minister Eva Lawler said commercial and community solar farms could not start supplying the NT grid until there was enough battery storage in the system to stop intermittent solar power causing blackouts.
But she said with some batteries now under construction, she was hoping connections would happen soon.
“The issue has been around the stability of the grid, so that has been a sticking point, but we are getting very close to full implementation of those solar farms,” she said.
“We want to facilitate renewable energy. We want to get to our 50 per cent by 2030 target.”
Ms Dixon said she was delighted her community had become one tiny part of the transition.
“We are so happy inside of our stomach and inside of our heart, and we’re so proud that we’ve got clean energy from the sun, that’s in our community, right now,” she said.