Local energy expertise key to unlocking Australia's renewable future

As Australia accelerates its shift to renewable energy, industry professionals are grappling with an inconvenient truth: many of the most impactful investments must happen not in remote utility-scale projects, but in neighbourhoods, towns, and communities. From rooftop solar to local battery storage, it’s increasingly clear that the future of energy is decentralised — and that local leadership, knowledge, and trust are essential to making it work.

“Between 50 to 80 per cent of the investment needed to reach Australia’s energy transition goals will need to happen locally,”

says Heather Smith, electrical engineer, energy and climate change specialist at Changing Weather, and Chair of the Coalition for Community Energy (C4CE).

That includes rooftop solar, electrification of homes and small businesses, flexible demand control systems, EV charging, and mid-scale renewables. “This is why trust, place-based knowledge, and genuine local leadership are essential to Australia’s energy transition,” says Smith.

Despite this, most energy developers and policymakers continue to focus narrowly on utility-scale investments — wind farms, transmission lines, and large batteries — without fully acknowledging the social infrastructure and local expertise required to connect these assets meaningfully to place, Smith argues. This disconnect is rooted in outdated consultation models that view communities as obstacles to be managed, rather than partners in system design. “Consultation is the wrong approach,” she says. “It creates us and them. It reeks of doing something to or for communities, not with them.”

This criticism is echoed by practitioners on the ground. In the regional Victorian town of Venus Bay, the Community Centre — under the leadership of manager Alyson Skinner — has co-designed a roadmap for community energy in collaboration with residents and technical experts. The result is a locally-led, resilience-focused plan that has attracted further investment and aligned with community priorities.

“Consultation is often done as a one-way-street — apply iterative design principles and continue the conversations over time — it's often just done once, and that's it — so very frustrating!” says Skinner.

“Community members are keen to be involved in decisions that affect them — often projects are done to, rather than with communities,” she continues. “We have a significant role in pushing for different ways of working, co-designing, true collaboration and modelling opportunities for community benefit systems where communities are in control of their own assets and resources.” 

Consultation often focuses on legitimising a project and managing expectations by hearing about and balancing various forms of self-interest. What community engagement specialists should be doing, Smith argues, is listening to people's expertise — lived experience, local priorities and local context contribute expert knowledge from a local perspective and ideally should be used to influence project design and outcomes.

At the heart of this model is trust. Community organisations bring place-based knowledge, longstanding networks, and credibility that large external stakeholders often lack. As Skinner puts it, “they provide trusted networks and local knowledge — and can advocate for better and more engaged solutions that directly benefit community members.”

Smith agrees that local partners are critical for driving uptake of technologies like solar and batteries. But beyond uptake, she emphasises the need for communities to guide decision-making over energy use, especially as demand response and control systems become more prevalent. “Who is behind the curtain?” she asks. “Regardless of who ends up coordinating household and business energy, some level of local negotiation and agreement will need to be in place.”

This ethos of local governance also underpins the work of Moragh Mackay, managing director at Mycelia Renewables, a social enterprise which supports rural business and community initiatives to participate in and benefit from the energy transition.

Mycelia recently facilitated co-design with the Venus Bay and Tarwin Lower communities on the ‘Reliable Energy and Community Resilience’ feasibility study and the Community Plan for Community Energy. Mycelia’s approach is centred on deep engagement, collaborative governance, and designing benefit-sharing models that reflect local values.

“Our job was to ensure community members felt heard, had multiple ways in which they could connect with and contribute to the project, felt empowered to do that in meaningful ways and that their input was reflected in the project outputs,” says Mackay. “This was a thorough and exceptional process – how engagement can be done, when you respect the value of genuine engagement and the impact it can have across many levels.”

“Doing engagement well, involves working closely with Traditional Owners and understanding the community a developer is stepping into, the local culture and values, needs and vision for their community,” says Mackay. “Taking time to do this thoroughly and reflecting back how design of the energy project and the scale of benefit-sharing is being influenced by local concerns and needs can be effective in building actual relationships, not just acting in transactional ways.”

But scaling these successes requires structural reform. According to Mackay,

“Unfortunately, the competitive environment that developers work within limits collaboration.”  

MacKay calls for policies that guarantee a minimum share of National Electricity Market (NEM) energy is community-owned, backed by grants and low-cost finance to empower local delivery. This would allow smaller towns to develop their own infrastructure — such as town-scale solar and batteries — to meet local needs rather than exporting generation elsewhere. “With this certainty, communities could plan and deliver a wide range of projects from small to mid-scale with a range of partners that could see significant value creation for local communities and their economies.”

Examples like the Sapphire Wind Farm, where local residents were offered preferential shareholding, show the power of financial models that retain profits within communities. “It could be massively impactful on local economies and collectively on the Australian economy if more developers took this approach,” says Mackay.

At the national level, C4CE is advocating for exactly this kind of structural change. The organisation, which is the peak body of the growing community energy sector in Australia, warns that current efforts to reach individual consumers through one-to-many broadcast channels are insufficient. Instead, resources need to flow directly to local government and community groups to build trusted delivery mechanisms.

“Trust and learning require something more personal,” says a C4CE spokesperson. “Regions where community energy groups were active had better uptake of electrification and stronger support for the energy transition.”

C4CE argues that what’s missing in most developer-community partnerships is a long-term relationship based on shared goals — not only for decarbonisation, but for local prosperity. “An enduring relationship, a shared commitment to the energy transition and a shared energy vision… delivered in partnership on the back of the use of the community's energy resources.”

Despite pockets of success, Smith says Australia still struggles with a basic failure of imagination: “The biggest barrier is our inability to imagine a central role for community. I think most governments and market operatives believe that they do all the provision of necessary goods and services beyond the privacy of people's families. This is not true and never has been.”

She points to legacy community energy initiatives like Hepburn Energy and Totally Renewable Yackandandah as proof of concept. “The initial investment leverages [sic] so much activity and additional funding over the years,” Smith says of Hepburn.

“Energy is one of a number of investments that can keep wealth local and be leveraged to perpetually build a stronger community.” 

Rewiring Australia and the Electrify Everything campaign, Zero Emissions Noosa, and Clean Energy for Eternity Northern Beaches are further case studies.

“All of these initiatives are a journey, more than a destination, she clarifies that the projects have been evolving for upwards of a decade.

The message for Australia’s energy sector professionals is clear: community energy is not a ‘nice to have’—it’s a critical pillar of the transition. Projects that neglect local knowledge, ignore lived experience, or treat communities as passive recipients are not only ethically questionable, they risk falling short on technical and economic grounds.

If there’s one takeaway for developers and policymakers seeking to support community-led energy, Smith puts it succinctly: “People need to consider ways to work with communities and go actively looking for the community groups — which will sometimes be community energy groups — and the local government champions that will be best to collaborate with.”

In an era of decentralised infrastructure and distributed responsibility, expertise doesn’t just sit in boardrooms or control centres. It lives in local halls, regional co-ops, and community centres — quietly, but powerfully, helping shape a more democratic, resilient, and just energy future.