New Year, New Renewable Energy For Bathurst Council

As of January 1, NSW’s Bathurst Regional Council’s operations have been fully powered by renewable energy.

In October last year, Council contracted to source 100 per cent renewable energy for all its small market electricity sites via Shell Energy. Prior to that in August, the organisation inked a contract for renewable electricity to power its large sites and street lighting, which commenced on Sunday.

Under the arrangement, electricity is being sourced primarily from Iberdrola’s Bodangara wind farm; a 113.2 MW facility situated approximately 15 kilometres east of Wellington, which is near Dubbo in New South Wales.

Bathurst Regional Council has achieved zero emissions electricity for all its facilities and streetlights between the two contracts, slashing emissions by around 10,000 tonnes annually.

“The contracts mean Council will exceed the renewable energy targets adopted in June 2020 as part of the Renewable Energy Action Plan, and will also go a long way to helping Council achieve the target of 25 per cent reduction in operational greenhouse gas emissions by 2025,” said Mayor Robert Taylor.

The Renewable Energy Action Plan (REAP) had set goals of 25% of the organisation’s electricity consumption to be from renewable sources by 2023, and 50% by 2025 – so Bathurst Regional Council has done very well.

Not Just Large-Scale Renewables

These contracts aren’t the organisation’s only efforts with regard to renewable energy. It has also been giving the rollout of rooftop solar installations on various assets across the community a red-hot go; with some battery storage also involved.

Bathurst was a local government PV pioneer, with its first solar power system installed in 2009. As some indicator how much the cost of solar panels has dropped since then, that original 2kW installation was worth around $28,000!

A 2kW installation in 2023 – not that many would install a system so small nowadays – is around the $3,000 – $4,500 range after the national solar subsidy. And you can get a much bigger system for not much more.

Beyond the 2009 installation, Bathurst Regional Council continued racking up panels. This page is a bit dated, but states total capacity of systems installed on 15 facilities to June 2020 was just over 571kW. There have been other installations since, including an additional 16.38kW of solar panels for the Bathurst Rail Museum; bringing that system’s total size to 38.9kW. Also installed at the museum were two Tesla Powerwall batteries and advanced solar monitoring.

And there may be more installations in the pipeline according to the REAP.

Bathurst Community And Solar Energy

The broader community has also been embracing PV. When we last checked in, more than 5,435 small-scale (<100kW) systems had been installed in Bathurst’s postcode area (2795) as at the end of November 2021. By the end of November 2022, the tally had grown to 6,293 systems.

You can find further statistics and learn more about installing solar panels in Bathurst here – and find great solar installers servicing Bathurst here.