Gadgetory

you wouldn't think of town of 350 people would have a need for solar-powered bikes but here in the town of targum on the east coast of Australia they want to remove their dependence on the electricity grid and go completely renewable so toggle energy project is a community energy project that aims to take the whole town of talcum and the surrounding village off grid and make them carbon neutral using renewable energy only whilst being off-grid was an important goal being carbon neutral was probably more important so an important step in becoming carbon neutral more importantly than off-grid is becoming as efficient as possible with how you use energy so one way we do that is install energy monitors within their meter box and that goes to a web portal and people can then have a look at graphs of their data and time and use data to match up when they were using energy for how much they were using this town we want it to be off grid and we want people to value the fact that they've got a say in the cost of energy I think Australia generally with our renewable policy is it's not progressive at all and we've got so much more capability we've got the technical expertise we've got the land we've got the availability we just need the foresight and the and the leadership as soon as I grow you know it was just like wow how come I haven't been here before it's just a great vibe when I came in as I went up to one of the little cafes up the road and it's just this little hidden world out here that I wasn't aware of so I bought the old butter factory down the road and it was this big cool building that didn't have much use for it and I thought what what could I do with this building here in relationship to educating the general public about sustainability and yeah renewable energy in general my name's paladin Nova and I work in the Bakehouse I like a lot of people here I've got you know a few different things I don't with I know small towns at the end of the grid it sometimes costs more to send power that far down the grid we often get power cuts so I think as an introductory kind of pilot exercise it's great to look at this with small towns like us the cafe that I'm involved with we have a system that covers 30 to 40 percent of our use and we're also looking to do it with some of the other businesses in town our first solar system that was put in takes the energy direct and puts it into a system that we're using during the day so where is all the solar power going to come from well right now the people of targum have solar panels on their roofs but the goal is to eventually take this paddock and put in a giant covered walkway covered with enough solar panels to power the entire town and beyond now in our case that's enough to provide the majority of power that we use in the township itself wouldn't give us the ability to retail or have any over and above power but would certainly be enough to offset most of our usage we have identified another area just out of town we would put on more like a commercial solar array and that's probably what we'd be using for our retail or commercial side coal is necessarily obviously you know we're wedded to coal for the time being but we need to be phasing out of it I'm hoping that algum will be a pilot an example and a good one that will show others that this is what can be done