Dalwallinu hosts energy meeting

Central Midlands & Coastal Advocate
Thursday 2/8/2007 Page: 3

RURAL WA took a step closer towards generating its own high quality, reliable, renewable electricity this week, when Dalwallinu Shire hosted the Energising Regional WA Group meeting. The group met to discuss its strategic plan that could result in every Wheatbelt shire setting up locally-based, renewable energy generation plants.

South West MLC Paul Llewellyn, who established the Denmark Community Wind Farm project on the South Coast and who has put forward the Western Australian Renewable Energy Target Bill in State Parliament, was the keynote speaker at the meeting. Mr Llewellyn outlined a strategy for establishing locally-based, clean-green energy generators to service local needs and to feed excess power into the South West Integrated System electricity grid. He emphasised the need to assess electricity use at the local level and to ascertain the capacity of existing electricity lines.

Each project can then be matched to work out the practicalities of building the electricity plants and running a business to supply power." At the meeting it was also recognised that while the project being undertaken would determine costs and benefits, and evaluate which combination of power production would best suit each location, active support from State and Federal Governments was needed to encourage development. "Other developed country have set clean energy targets and provided financial incentives to renewable power generators which has driven multi billion dollar investment in a clean, safe, job-rich industries," Mr Llewellyn said.

The next step for the Energising Regional WA Group is to source funding to employ a project coordinator who will assess the potential for renewable energy projects in the Shires of Dalwallinu, Morawa and Wongan-Ballidu to local needs and local grid capacity. Mr Llewellyn said less than 40 years ago every local community produced their own electricity for local use.

"Using modern wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and gas-fired power generation technologies we can re-power regional areas with clean, safe, modern and reliable electricity supplies," he said. "Regional WA could become the power supplier for the State feeding electricity back to homes, business and industry." Dalwallinu Shire president Robert Nixon said the details from the Denmark experience halved the work. "We already have access to the latest in wind, solar, biomass, geothermal technology, and qualified personnel so we don't have to be scientists or engineers ourselves," Cr Nixon said. "What we now have with Paul Llewellyn and the Denmark experience is a partnering which expands the ability of both groups.