– Thomasen Knight, Regional Programs Manager, RE-Alliance.

What are regional energy strategies? Simply, they are a clear articulation of a community-informed place-based roadmap and vision, which is unique to each locale and associated represented communities.

Having a regional energy strategy means that opportunities that come with the shift to renewable energy can then be shaped to enable or strengthen specific components of the community’s vision, like reliable and cheap electricity for all or legacy affordable housing.

We’ve seen a couple of recent examples, and commend the organisations and individuals who have made them a reality. 

Uralla Shire Council in NSW, supported by The Next Economy, has gathered insights from the community that will inform the Council’s Renewable Energy Strategic Plan, due out at the end of 2025. The plan sets out strategies and actions to address challenges and realise opportunities, so that benefits are shared fairly and value endures.

A completed version of this process is the Wanaruah/Wonnarua people’s Community Energy Strategy, supported by AusGrid and Indigenous Energy Australia. The Strategy provides a framework for respectful, community-led energy development in the Upper Hunter, a region central to New South Wales’ energy shift.

Hay Shire Council in NSW, supported by RE-Alliance, has outlined how they’d like to approach renewable energy, on their terms. They have a set of principles which outline the town’s expectations for any future renewable projects.

These examples differ in that some are community-driven, others are company-led. Whilst companies can play a role, community agency must be at the centre, setting the terms of negotiation and collaboration and creating the strategy content.

Regional energy strategies start by convening big, local conversations about what the renewable energy shift is, what role rural and regional communities are being asked to play, and what risks and opportunities can be identified in each region. They then progress to identify what communities want out of hosting large-scale infrastructure and how this gels with their long term community vision. Best practice strategy uptake and implementation requires proponents and other energy stakeholders to absorb the information within and use it as a guide for engagement and negotiation.

Different types of organisations can ‘own’ regional energy strategies, for example councils or First Nations groups. They might also be called something different, but cover a similar process. The important part is that the strategies deeply reflect what the community wants.

We’d argue the process to develop the strategy is equally important as the document itself and its use. When done well, the process of creating a regional energy strategy:

• Increases technical knowledge in the community
  Brings all stakeholders up to the same minimum level of understanding about the shift to renewable energy and what it means for their region. 
• Improves understanding between stakeholders
  Provides opportunities for understanding the risks and opportunities associated with, for example, hosting large-scale renewable energy infrastructure, from different perspectives, such as for households, local business, local industry, community, council or First Nations groups.
  Involving a broad range of stakeholder perspectives and ideas strengthens the community in itself through shared understanding and awareness, as well as the strategy as it’s more likely to be accepted.
• Builds a widely accepted vision for the community
  Facilitates a community-wide vision that articulates what’s important to the community into the future – which is generally much broader than energy alone. 

All of this is not to take away from the strategy document itself. It is incredibly important as, for one, it helps outsiders, like renewable energy companies, understand what’s important to the community of interest, including priorities for impact mitigation and benefit sharing of hosting renewable energy infrastructure. It provides a bunch of benefits to ‘owner’ organisations too, such as, on a practical level, a document for all external stakeholders to read before they meet with your community representatives and landholders.

There’s a heap of work involved to build the capacity of community to enable meaningful contribution in strategies like this, as well as in the strategy engagement phase – holding a number of focus groups, workshops and forums and collating input. 

Ideally, councils, First Nations and community groups are adequately resourced to do this work themselves, or bring in experts as desired – but unfortunately that is not what we’re seeing on the ground in rural and regional Australia. What we’re seeing is that, for many, these critical strategies are put on the back-burner, buried under a mountain of pressing business as usual activity. 

Without regional energy strategies, engagement between energy stakeholders, including proponents, can become reactive, uncoordinated, repetitive and overwhelming.

It’s fantastic that not-for-profits and industry are stepping in to fund or support the development of some strategies, in some regions – but this is not a sustainable model at a time when this work, that delivers huge bang for buck, is of critical importance.

We’d like to see organisations that are leading the shift to renewable energy on the ground be adequately resourced to undertake this work themselves. We hear consistently, from rural and regional leaders across the country, that local capacity gaps are real. Place-based capacity, across Australia, must match the scale of the task at hand – how our national energy shift rolls out depends on it.