By Callum Ludwig
Two Upper Yarra groups are set to benefit from grants through AusNet’s Energy Resilience Community Fund, introduced after the February storms to help improve energy resilience and literacy in communities.
The Millgrove Resident’s Action Group (MRAG) will receive $22,000 for their Millgrove Community & Energy Resilience Training Program and the Powelltown Residents’ Water Association (PRWA) will receive $13,000 for their Powering Up Powelltown project.
MRAG Associate Member Sam Rye said their funding will be directed to energy and community resilience training and improving the capacity of both in the township.
“Residents will learn about things like renewable energy and batteries um, as well as community resilience, working with some of the excellent folks at ResilientCo who are national leaders exploring community resilience and training people in that,” he said.
“This application for funding was already guided by the work that MRAG had been doing under the Resilient Millgrove Plan, which was a community-developed plan that already looks at a range of different factors that are going to help Millgrove to become a more resilient community, building resilience to the various challenges from climate and different social dynamics,”
“We’re definitely really keen for people who want to go deep and come along for that journey of multiple workshops or field visits and the like, but we also welcome the broader community who are interested in, what they’ve heard about these different systems such as solar battery, and they want to just understand more about it and how it might be relevant to them.”
MRAG’s resilience efforts in recent times have included the Millgrove Muster event held in 2022, the development of the Millgrove Resilience Plan and the Millgrove Community Open Days held in 2023 and 2024. The program the AusNet funding will go towards will look to help educate and train residents, households and businesses to be more energy resilient and to help out in disaster events in the community such as storms.
MRAG Vice President Phil Pomaroff said it’s definitely funding they wouldn’t otherwise have had to deliver training and education.
“Having more people out there that can get into what we need to achieve, it’s going to be beneficial so we are quite grateful for the funding,” he said.
“We had a training program last Saturday in activating an emergency hub and it’s something that we want to be able to increase the capacity of by training people up, so after a big event you want to have a place where people can get to and find out information, report information, recharge phones, hopefully, access communications and get counselling, all of the stuff that you need,”
“We’re isolated so we need somewhere people can get that help at the local level, the ground level, and then hopefully as time goes on we’ll get the Council and other resources coming and help with the effort.”
MRAG anticipate being able to roll out the new training program in January or February 2025.
President of the PRWA Nick Smith said their funding will go towards undressing the very unreliable power they have found we have out in the Valley.
“We’ve found out the hard way that when the power goes out we can be days without power and part of our action plan for the resilience of the town, of course, involves power because without power we have no communications and we’re isolated totally..” he said.
“When this grant became available we applied because we could see that we’ve got a hub of buildings there that we’ve identified as going to be part of our recovery and AusNet came up with the grant to help us to do that so we’re very thrilled.”
In the event of an outage, Mr Smith and other Powelltown residents have experienced that the telephone exchange servicing the town can fail within 14 hours and within another hour and a half, they are without mobile service so access to power is crucial in keeping communications online.
Mr Smith said without the funding, they otherwise would not have been able to implement this part of their plan.
“With this, we will at least be able to power up satellite services to have some form of communication out to the outside world, that’s what’s happening up here, we’ll use that to communicate with who we need to and to get messages out to say what the community needs in a recovery situation,” he said.
“Whatever comes our way, we’re going to need some form of power to do what we’ve got to do to fix things, but I’m very proud of our association, we’re a good bunch of locals who care about their community.”
The PWRA has been operating in the township for over 30 years, having built and maintained the town’s gravity-powered water system while also establishing an Emergency Committee who identified the need for mobile generators in the town, which the grant will fund.
Executive General Manager of Distribution at Ausnet Andrew Linnie said the company is pleased to be able to help make a difference through the Fund.
“The Energy Resilience Community Fund was created to enable projects that will build long-term community energy resilience and provide support to communities during recovery the recovery phase of severe weather events which significantly impact the network,” he said.
