Energy Ready: Empowering communities to build energy resilience

Transcript

We're proud to fund this project through our grants program as a collaboration grant. This meant we had the opportunity to work alongside the project partners, the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures, Community Power Agency and Parallel Lines, to bring this from an inspiring idea to a ground-breaking piece of work.

The Energy Ready project aims to gather lessons and best practices on community energy resilience. So, through extensive desktop research, deep community engagement, collaboration with experts in energy resilience and disaster response, plus a human-centred visual design approach, the project team was able to translate the findings into a one-of-a-kind resource for communities.

The definition of community energy resilience, which we proposed in the literature review, says that resilient communities are communities that utilise localised energy sources in order to prepare – that's to learn and to anticipate, to respond and withstand, and to recover from disasters. They also include aspects of social connections and social learning, economic aspects related to affordability and accessibility, and of course, renewable energy technologies and any technology solutions.

As a partner, Community Power Agency brought facilitation skills and engagement skills in figuring out who the communities should be that we are talking to, who are the correct people to come along to the workshop to give their insights and experiences, what they've been through in these disaster-affected and at-risk communities, and designing an interactive process that makes communities and people in these workshops feel comfortable and able to express what they've been through and do that deep thinking to share their experiences with others.

It's really essential that things like this are actually grounded in lived experience, and the way to do that is to go and listen and hear from communities that have gone through experiences like environmental disasters such as a fire or a flood, and hear about what they've done and then ground anything that you're wanting to inform other communities to help them prepare.

Things that I'm worried about in terms of energy resiliency are the short-term emergency situations that we're finding ourselves in, whether that's bushfire or flood, but I'm also worried about the long-term energy resiliency of communities. What I learned today was about understanding how this sort of energy resiliency happens at different levels and in different locations. At the more immediate short term, it made me start thinking about how I respond to an emergency situation and what the community needs to do and what I need to do as part of a community in responding to an emergency situation.

One of the things that we thought about with this project was that resilience comes from working out what you need to do for yourself. So, we've designed a guide that isn't just about giving people information and advice, but giving them the opportunity to develop their own approach to energy resilience.

Some of the main challenges we faced, there were two really. The first is that energy resilience is quite a complex topic, so really translating something that's quite complex into something that makes sense for communities. And the other challenge is that the topic can be quite distressing for people, especially communities who have been through disasters. So, trying to really portray the information in a way that's authentic and doesn't deny the seriousness but is also very upbeat and constructive and says, "Here's what you can do."

The Energy Ready Toolkit was produced in consultation with communities, for communities, and we really want it to be used. It contains seven steps to guide and help communities leverage their unique features, examine the risks they face, identify shared priorities, and develop a plan of action for improving energy resilience.

So, we encourage communities all across Australia to access this rich resource, use it and reuse it as many times as possible, and tell us how the Energy Ready Toolkit made them a stronger, safer, and more energy-resilient community.