Watters Electrical business development manager Reg Hickey made the comments at a climate summit hosted by Federal Member for Nicholls Sam Birrell in Shepparton on Thursday and Friday, February 23 and 24.
Watters is based in Shepparton, Albury and Wangaratta, employs around 240 people and is said to be the Goulburn Valley’s largest solar company, installing residential, large commercial and industrial systems, as well as large-scale solar farms.
Mr Hickey said his company was working with the region’s big power users on future energy generating options beyond solar.
“Waste is a fuel source,” he said.
“That can be cheap power.
“My mind is (turning) to how we get us all to come together so the whole community benefits, not just the individual companies that have got the capital to invest.
“That’s the social and community dilemma that we face with this.”
Mr Hickey also said although Greater Shepparton had one of the highest uptakes of solar power in the world, there was still significant demand on the network after dark because of a lack of battery installations.
He said the Federal Government should consider shifting subsidies from encouraging solar adoption to supporting battery installations.
“I think the Federal Government's got to change its view on what it used to do to implement and fund solar at a domestic level, to a battery, affordable battery, at a domestic level, to take that load later into the night,” he said.
Mr Hickey added that even greater solar uptake could be encouraged by penalties being introduced for new house builds that did not include solar.
A broad spectrum of experts and Goulburn Valley business leaders gathered at the Shepparton Brewery for the summit.
Climate Change Institute director at the Australian National University Mark Howden said there needed to be an urgency about developing solutions for climate change, as regions such as the Goulburn Valley would be impacted, just like the rest of the world.
“Often when you reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, you save money at the same time and similarly, looking at climate risks and how you can manage those climate risks,” Professor Howden said.
“It might be flooding or it might be intense rainfall or hail, and starting to think about what are the things you can do to remove some of those risks.”
Beyond Zero Emissions is a think tank that aims to show how Australia can prosper in a zero-emissions economy.
Its chief executive, Heidi Lee, was also at the conference and said around half the energy currently generated was wasted at the power stations, so savings could be made if it was created near the customers who would use it.
“There’s an enormous opportunity in businesses collaborating together so that we can generate energy right near where it’s used, and waste an awful lot less of it,” she said.
“We’re working a lot with distributed energy resources as well, so we’re actually moving energy from being generated at scale kilometres, hundreds of kilometres away from where it’s used, to generating much more of it right where it’s needed.”
Charlotte Connell is director of Climate Salad, a network of climate tech companies, and said there was huge scope for “unicorns”, or businesses that see enormous growth from the world’s move towards net-zero emissions, to emerge from the regions, especially those in fields related to climate or agriculture technology, known as climatetech or agritech.
“We’re going to have to feed a growing population,” she said.
“We have to do more of it, not less of it, and we have limited resources, so there are many solutions that our primary producers around here are going to have to utilise, deploy and can scale and take globally.
“So it is a really rich, fertile ground. I mean it’s already been called out that Shepparton is an area where we will see the next unicorns come from.”
Mr Birrell said he hoped the two-day conference would help find local solutions that would protect the way of life in the region.
“There are people out there who want to improve their standard of living, and the government coming in telling them that they’ve got to be cold, or they can’t have a job because the factory they’re in can’t operate anymore because of soaring energy prices, that’s not an option,” he said.
“So we’ve got to find technological solutions, and hopefully that’s what these two days are about.”
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