A new town in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley could be Australia’s first completely renewable and totally off grid town.

A $1.1million study supported by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) will see the first new town in Hunter Valley in 50 years be created – Huntlee. Huntlee will house 20 000 new residents in 7500 homes. It will be developed by LWP Property Group and it 50 minutes from Newcastle, 20 mins north of Cessnock and just over 25 minutes from Maitland.

“If this latest work shows renewables, battery storage and enabling technologies can reliably and cost effectively power new suburbs, it could set a precedent for residential developments and potentially accelerate the uptake of renewables in Australia,” said ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht.

Mr Frischknecht said that is very costly to connect the new town to the main grid and so renewables (with continually fallings costs) was a logical choice. Hopefully the uptake of renewables and no mains grid will encourage more to ditch the grid.

“We’re excited by the possibility of developing Australia’s first town-scale greenfield microgrid and all of the advantages that level of innovation would bring to our residents and commercial operators,” said Huntlee Project Director Stephen Thompson.

Many companies, such as Brookfield Energy Australia, Flow Systems, Siemens, Kinesis and CSIRO will collaborate on the project in order to get the best results. Many have experience with microgrids around Australia and know how to avoid or solve the barriers that renewable grids face.

Brookfield Energy CEO Richie Sheather welcomed the announcement. “We are excited to be exploring sustainable alternative solutions for energy and water infrastructure solutions and see an emerging competitive market for large-scale local microgrids leveraging high penetration renewable,” Mr Sheather said.

Flow Systems, a Brookfield company, is spearheading Brookfield’s sustainable multi-utility initiative across Australia.

“Our goal is to develop a model that has 10 times the penetration of renewables for the equivalent cost of energy. Proving this can be done technically and commercially will be a real step change for embedded renewables in this country,” Flow Systems Managing Director Terry Leckie said.