In regional Australia, extreme weather events and underfunding can devastate small towns. In Yackandandah, a small town in northeast Victoria, a risky decision over twenty years ago has made them more resilient to both.
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TRANSCRIPT
"I never ever thought I'd thank Donald Trump for anything, in my wildest dreams."
Russell Klose has always worked with cars.
"When you go through Yackandandah, there's the bottom garage, it's called Yackandandah Motors. That's what it used to be called, and that was my garage for many years, and before that it was my father's garage. So I grew up looking after agricultural equipment, fixing cars, trucks out the front that would break down on the way to market with cows inside, pissing on me while I was under the truck and whatnot. So that has been where I came from."
After opening his own business in Wodonga in the 90's, he spent around three decades importing and selling Japanese performance cars.
"So I've always enjoyed that. But once I got out of importing from Japan, that was it. I didn't want anything more to do with cars."
One day, after deciding to retire, someone in the community changed his mind.
Now, he has a new business selling electric cars and his community, Yackandandah, is on its way to becoming 100 per cent renewable.
To understand his story and the community that shaped it, we have to go back a few decades.
"When I was growing up, there were a lot of empty shops in Yack. It was a bit of a sleepy old town. Like, I could kick the footy up the main street and not be worried about being hit by a truck. So yeah, it's just, I don't know, one of those places that's pretty special to be here."
Max Horvath was born in Yackandandah - or Yack to the locals.
One day, in 2002, a sign on the door of a business in town changed everything.
"The original servo in town, which was owned by Jack Holden, he was going to close it down. It just wasn't viable for him anymore. So he put a notice on the window of the servo saying it's going to be closed in 10 days, which was a bit of a shock to some people."
At the time of the closure, people were moving out of small towns across the country.
"We took that for granted, and it's not going to be there anymore. And so a few people thought, "Oh, this is not good for the town." Especially when you look at what was happening, I think there was a report came out in 1998 that in the previous decade, 30 per cent of the small towns in Australia had a decline in population. So the towns were dying ."
When small towns lose an essential service like the petrol station, it forces people to leave.
"And then it's a real battle to keep the town going. Yeah. So there were a few people, Phil Newman is one of them, and that was him walking around there before, said, "What are we going to do?"
So a group of seven locals formed the Yackandandah Community Development Company - or YCDCo to buy the station and opened the company up to local shareholders.
Moving locations, running at a loss and relying on volunteers, it wasn't easy.
"To find the money that was required without having anything is really difficult. You might have GoFundMe and those sorts of things now- Yeah ... but back then, none of that was around. You had to get the community involved to make it happen. And being the community that it is, most people said, "Yeah, well, that's worth doing. Let's do it."
Max now sits on the board of YCDCo, and the station is not only commercially sustainable but makes a profit.
With hundreds of local shareholders, all profits go either directly to locals or into funding grants for community projects like sporting clubs and the health facility.
By owning the station, the board keeps prices down, and instead of selling cigarettes and snacks like other petrol stations, it's stocked with hardware and farm supplies.
While still vulnerable to fuel supply issues, Max says the station was able to stay stocked when other regional towns were running dry.
"We actually didn't run out of fuel here, and we can't do anything about the terminal gate price. That's totally out of our control. So prices went up, but in March, we had a record month ever and we did have to sort of ration the supplies a bit and... But I think there was only one day or one night where we ran out of diesel. But apart from that, we didn't run out."
Covered with rooftop solar and fixed with a battery, the station is able to keep both emissions and running costs down - meaning it can put more back into the community.
And despite making its profits from fuel and hardware sales, it also owns an electric vehicle charger in town.
"Can I lean? Yeah, good. [laughs] It's what I do best. [laughs] Go Joe Hockey."
Russell Klose now runs a second hand EV business called KiloWatt cars, selling cars from Yackandandah all the way to Darwin alongside his son Cam and another local, Matt.
After all but retiring, he says an event in town made him reconsider.
"Then Matt Grogan, one of the partners in the company, just kept at me and at me for nearly a year to start importing out of Japan again. And we met at one of the openings of a battery in Yackandandah up at Ben Gilberts. There's a community-owned battery there. And I sort of got home after that and thought, "Oh, God. We, particularly the older generation, have got to do something. We've just taken so much, and it's time to start giving back a bit." So I rang Matt up and just said, "Look, let's do it."]]
"I'm not here to record a guilt trip for the older generation. That's not what I'm saying. But I think particularly when you've got kids and they point things out which you would often miss, when they start doing that, you start reflecting and thinking, "Yeah, we had pretty good times." And the times were fun, and it all just seemed normal. But there comes a time where you think, "Ah, we took a lot, so it's time to start giving back and hopefully preserve something for the future generations," and hope it's not going to be too late. So there has been an awakening."
For Russell, the motivation to go electric was clear.
"I realized this the other day too, that I want it to be for future generations, but I want it to be for the fish and the birds and all the animals and the bugs and the insects. Our fish are dying because the oceans are warming. We've just got this swathe of destruction around us, and it's time to try and address it."
But despite his motivations, Russell says switching over from petrol and diesel vehicles shouldn't have to be ideological.
"By owning an EV, you're not missing out on anything. The performance is phenomenal. The cost of ownership is great. And when they challenge me about this or that, I can challenge them straight back about the costs of fixing their diesel engine because I know how much they cost. And it's not just a couple of thousand. It's so expensive to repair a lot of that new stuff. Because they'll always challenge me, "What about the battery? You've got to replace them every few years." Because that's been the dialogue they hear from various news outlets. Whereas now batteries in these are basically life of vehicle."
While the recent fuel crisis has been crippling for many businesses, Russell says it's made the case for electrification even stronger.
"I can't go and stop the fossil fuel industry, even though Donald Trump's doing a good job of it at the moment. But I've just got to do the best I can. [laughs] Oh, okay. What do I say here? [laughs] Yeah. And just be careful where you're... I trust you guys. Yeah. But the point is, I never thought I'd trust-- I never ever thought I would thank Donald Trump for anything, in my wildest dreams. And he's promoted electrification. Bang, like that. I just sold so many cars after the first month of the invasion. So many I could not get, and I'm still struggling to get stock now. The price of secondhand ones has just gone up, and everybody wants them, and it's all because of Donald."
In 2008, Matt Charles-Jones moved to Yackandandah and lives in a house he built himself out of mud and straw bales.
"The beauty of straw is that it's really deep walls, so super insulative. It's a waste product and ultimately it's organic, so would compost down and be used however. So all of those attributes add up well, and it kind of lends itself well to unskilled builders, I'm not a builder at all. Because it's quite forgiving. You've got a deep wall. You can make mistakes and fix it relatively easily. And my mum lived in Yackandandah, which was about 30Ks from where I grew up. And so it was really just, she died, and we were looking for somewhere nice to live. And so bought the property and built this house."
Back in 2002, when Yackandandah was facing a change beyond its control, the community refused to be left behind.
In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a landmark report concluding with 95 per cent certainty that human activity was the leading cause of recent global warming.
With a background in ecology and outdoor education, Matt could see another change coming.
"The fossil fuel industry makes a lot of money out of doing what they do. And so they're very skilled at adding misunderstanding and confusion and anger to what should be a really smart, logical next step. And it's hard. It can be really hard, and you don't need to go very far in a country community to find deep upset, an understandable upset about somebody's proposed a solar farm or a battery or a wind farm or a transmission line. And it's understandable because change is hard. But equally, I think that we have to change, and we have to change because of climate change."
So Matt and a few others pitched a project to the town, one that they hoped would someday end their reliance on fossil fuels.
" So the council in March 2014 ran a community information evening, and fortunately, there was some amazing examples around Australia and around the world of communities that were doing some good thinking about, well, what do you need to do to localise electricity and to move on to the next phase, knowing that the fossil fuel industry's in a sunset, making a lot of noise, but in a sunset phase."
For regions on the edge of the power grids, increasing extreme weather events mean more vulnerability to outages and harsher conditions for farmers.
While the rollout of large scale renewables wasn't really an option in Yack, people here were determined to do something.
That's when they founded Totally Renewable Yackandandah - or TRY, with funding support from the petrol station and the ambitious goal of becoming 100 per cent powered by renewable energy.
"And instead, the focus turned to what can you do on individual rooftops and small installations. And I suppose that finding was really foundational in what we've gone on to do with Totally Renewable Yackandandah. It's like, let's just keep it hyper-focused, rooftop by rooftop, individual needs by individual needs."
For over ten years, Matt served as President of TRY.
12 years after it was founded, the town now owns two large scale community batteries, and almost 70 per cent of rooftops in the area have solar.
"It means that the community building can spend much less on electricity. They then have their own power system, which is decarbonising their power supply. And in the instances where batteries are added, they've got the capability of running through outages. And so that becomes increasingly relevant when we get extremes in weather, obviously, and perhaps that's emergencies as well because it means that people will lose power in their home because the network is so vulnerable to extremes in weather. And consequently, they can come somewhere and cook and catch up with friends and have a cup of tea and go to the toilet, all of those things that when you live out in the country, and you lose power, you lose water, you lose heating and cooling. And it happens more often than would be ideal."
By keeping power in the hands of locals, Yack has shown how regional Australians don't have to be passive recipients of energy projects.
Households with rooftop solar not only reduce emissions and bring down energy bills, but they can also feed power back into the grid and earn money through feed in tariffs.
While change is undeniably difficult, Matt argues that the willingness to adapt has made the town strong.
"It's a powerful exemplar in Yackandandah to Yackandandah people that if you have an issue, and then you focus on it and set a goal, then you can resolve it. And so the petrol station is an energy company. It's community-owned. It returns dividends. It's kept the fuel supply alive in the town. A really powerful example of what we've just picked up and used, but done it with electricity."
In part two of this two part series, SBS looks at how Totally Renewable Yackandandah continues to make a difference and how renewable projects can succeed when they keep communities at the centre.
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