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Matt Charles-Jones – founder of Totally Renewable Yackandandah (TRY) and long-time Indigo Power supporter, customer and shareholder – has been nominated in Australian of the Year Awards as a contender in the Victoria Local Hero category.

The Local Hero Award acknowledges extraordinary contributions made by an individual in their local community, and what a number of contributions Matt has made.

Matt founded TRY, a volunteer-run community energy group, in 2014 with the aim to make Yackandandah’s energy 100% renewable by 2022. His drive has inspired and motivated many to form community energy groups across the state.

Matt, TRY and Indigo Power have worked together to achieve this goal. The town now has its own solar energy grid, with almost 500 small-scale solar power systems installed and a big battery on the horizon. Earlier this month TRY received a $170,000 grant from the Victorian Government to support and expand a community-owned battery, providing more clean energy to the Yackandandah Community Energy Hub and a vital step toward the town reaching its goal.

We are so proud of the work Matt has done and continues to do – Congrats on your nomination Matt! 

Indigo Power and TRY and the Yackandandah Community Hub Launch. November 2019.

Well, the Roadshow finished up yesterday, and while it didn’t quite go as planned (who could have anticipated a global pandemic), it is clear there is a huge amount of passion across our region.

More than 250 people participated in either face-to-face Roadshow events or over a series of webinars. We’ve got a lot to learn about delivering online webinars, but it was great to see 120 people attend those online events, despite the circumstances

It has been a pretty tough six months for North East Victoria. But we believe that building a local renewable energy economy, with local ownership, can play an important role in the recovery of our region, after the bushfires, and after the current pandemic.

We’ve also calculated that over $160 million leaves our region in electricity bills each year. Working with communities to source and build as much local clean energy as possible, can help change that. Now, more than ever, keeping money in our region is so important.  

Core to this proposition is true community ownership, local jobs, local investment, and local partnerships.. We’re also a social enterprise, which means that 50% of profits go back into clean energy projects in our region. 

We’re currently offering community members the chance to become Indigo Power shareholders, with a minimum shareholding of $100. We know it’s a hard time, but we can still reach our target of 300 Indigo Power shareholders, owning 100% of the company.

You can find out more here.

We will use the funds raised through this share offering to keep working with communities to deliver renewable energy solutions. This includes: 

• Expanding our Community Energy Hubs offer to more people across North East Victoria and into the Border Region of NSW; 
• Building more renewable energy generation and storage infrastructure to power our communities; and
• Developing our online software to better demonstrate energy sharing across our hubs. 

Thanks for everyone that came to the Roadshow events, and to our fantastic customers and shareholders.  We’re looking forward to working with you to build our local, clean energy future.

Our goal is to power East Victoria with renewable energy.  We know that everyday people working together can overcome huge challenges. So, we’re setting up community energy hubs to enable a community response to climate change.

The electricity sector is the largest single driver of climate change. But we’ve also calculated that over $160 million leaves our region in electricity bills each year. We think a local energy provider, that sources as much local clean energy as possible, can help change that.

We also believe that building a local renewable energy economy, with local ownership, can play an important role in the recovery of our region, after the bushfires, and after the current pandemic.

Watch the presentation below and find out how you can join in and connect up with your local community energy hub.

To launch community energy hubs across the region we’d planned a Roadshow with members of the North East Community Energy Network.

Instead of cancelling the Roadshow, we’re working with our community energy group partners to turn these public events into a series of webinars.

We’ve hosted two webinars already, and here’s what we’ve learnt:

1) We’re using Zoom for our webinars, which costs about $60 per month.

2) You can have two types of participants in the webinar. We’ve been having Indigo Power members and community energy group partners act as panelists. Panelists can speak, and have been moderating, presenting and responding to questions. Attendees are the second type of participants, who are there to find out more and ask questions.

3) The webinar can be set up so that attendees can speak, or they can ask questions by writing in. For simplicity, we’ve been using the second option.

4) We’ve also been live streaming the webinar to our Facebook Page. This is a great way for people to follow along without actually playing a part. Sending the video live to Facebook means that the webinar is available for others to view at a later time.

5) We haven’t changed the format of our events too much. We’ve been having an introduction from our local community partner, a presentation from Indigo Power, and most of the time has been dedicated to a robust question and answer session.

So far it seems to be working pretty well. But we want to make it better if we can. If you have any questions or would like to let us know how we can improve our webinars, please leave some feedback in the form below.

Here is the Indigo Power presentation about Indigo Power from the Wangaratta Webinar on Wednesday, 25 March.

The full webinars are on our Facebook page. Click here for Beechworth, and here for Wangaratta.

Find our more and RSVP for a webinar event here.