In the heart of the Barkly Tableland, in one of the country’s remotest regions, a quiet revolution in clean energy is being forged in the tiny Outback town of Marlinja. 

In July 2024, the Marlinja Community Solar Microgrid was commissioned, following five years of development preparation, and making history as Australia’s first Aboriginal-owned and grid-connected microgrid. 

Ray Dimakarri Dixon, a Mudburra elder and one of the drivers of the community-led initiative, says that the Christmas before the project was launched the community spent four weeks without power. 

“Without drinking water too, because the bore relies on power to run,” he says. “With the voltage spikes every day, a lot of families lost freezers full of food we had stored up for ceremony time. 

“We were carting water back and forth to our homes in temperatures of 40 every day while we waited for contractors from the utility to become available after the holidays.” 

He eventually said “enough” and asked Original Power to help start a community energy transition process – “so that we could demonstrate the difference when the community had real ownership of our own energy”. 

The community, which is land reclaimed as part of the Marlinja Aboriginal Land Trust, is home to 60 Mudburra and Jingili residents. 

Ray’s sister Janey says: “Before the solar, we grew up with just camp firelight, then candles. 

“Mum and dad bought a noisy generator, which we could only afford to run a few hours each day. Then we got the power station at Elliott and the line was run to Marlinja. That was good for a while, but after prepayment meters were brought in, the disconnections started because we couldn’t afford to keep up with the price of power.” 

More than 10,000 Territory households access power through prepayment, which disconnects automatically when credit runs out. 

“The houses get really hot,” says Janey. “Babies and old people were getting sick in the heat. Sometimes it’s a choice between keeping the house cool and feeding the family.” 

Since the microgrid was connected, household disconnection rates have dropped significantly, with families saving more than 70 percent on weekly power costs and freeing up the household budget for other essentials. 

To overcome prepayment challenges, an innovative benefit-sharing arrangement was co-developed, with the support of retailer Jacana. This allows households with prepayment meters to be auto-credited on a weekly basis with income proportional to solar generated at microgrid. 

Reliability has also significantly improved, with the microgrid’s battery enabling some protection from faults and outages at the Elliott power station. 

The NT Government-owned utility and retailer benefit too, accruing significant avoided diesel generation costs and buffering the volatility of diesel supply while Marlinja generates its own power. 

Since commissioning, Marlinja’s energy transition continues to demonstrate the economic development potential arising from access to affordable energy. 

The recent completion of household energy efficiency upgrades to optimise microgrid productivity and address legacy housing design challenges included swapping energy-hungry box air-conditioners with 65 new split systems and installing insulation. 

With works carried out by an increasingly skilled team of community energy workers under a newly established community-controlled organisation, Marlinja Bujbu Cooperative, residents are committed to growing local capacity to operate and maintain energy infrastructure to create additional employment and enterprise opportunities. 

But while the Marlinja Solar Microgrid is leading the field in energy access innovation and community-led design, getting there was no easy feat. 

First, the community were knocked back on a plan to install rooftop solar as PV panels were deemed too risky by the NT Government’s housing authority. 

When the community proposed a centralised solar array we were told we would need to fund an accompanying big battery to overcome power station solar hosting limitations and support grid-connection, or go without. 

Marlinja persisted, managing to fundraise $900,000 with the support of Original Power to navigate, innovate and overcome the technical, commercial and policy barriers that continue to lock vulnerable communities out of access to affordable, reliable energy. 

The experience demonstrates the stark reality that the only way we will see more transformative projects such as the Marlinja microgrid reach commissioning-stage is through deliberate de-risking of the processes to achieve grid-connection and commercial offtake agreements with government-owned utilities. 

Original Power is Australia’s first and only First Nations-led not-for-profit renewable energy developer. We work in some of the country’s most challenging jurisdictions to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to design, develop and deliver clean energy solutions. 

What our experiences supporting community-led clean energy initiatives in Western Australia,, the NT, South Australia and Far North Queensland has reinforced is that readily-implementable technical solutions are being complicated by legacy monopolistic energy utility supply arrangements, and a lack of evolving regulation to give certainty to communities, investors and project developers. 

Local energy resilience and decarbonisation must be treated as a whole-of-government opportunity, with appropriate incentivisation and risk-abatement built in to encourage investment from communities and project development partners. 

Attracting new industry and investment to the Territory’s challenging remote energy landscape requires clear regulatory signals from a government that it is willing to back projects that can reduce costs for both local communities, Territory consumers, and its bottom line. 

It’s something other jurisdictions have had to face head on or risk losing hundreds of millions in investment from energy projects. The UK’s Local Power Plan and the European Union’s Clean energy for all Europeans package offer clear and consistent regulation and resourcing for defining and rewarding the value of community energy projects, and offer policy blueprints for incentivising community-led decarbonisation locally. 

Across Australia’s North there are a range of advanced community renewable energy projects in the pipeline, poised to deliver significant household energy affordability benefits in addition to reduced reliance on government-subsidised diesel, including the Ngardara Solar Microgrid in Borroloola, the Ltyentye Apurte LAMP project in Santa Teresa, both of which have secured upfront capital from ARENA’s First Nations’ microgrid fund, and Djarindjin’s Argil Solar microgrid in the Kimberley. 

To progress these, governments must review existing rusted-on monopolistic regulatory energy systems and assess their readiness to fairly enable community proponents to play a critical role as lower cost competitor generators. 

As the future of diesel becomes more uncertain, it’s clear the renewables transition cannot afford more uncertainty or delay. Meaningful transition now requires action on three fronts. 

First, there must be clear and strict timelines on project assessment to avoid costly overruns. Certainty around processes and benchmarks for connection and commercial agreement-making is essential to unlock investor confidence. Without process certainties jurisdictions impose an avoidable risk premium on project costs of up to 20 percent, making community energy projects unnecessarily more expensive. 

Second, ensure commercial levers are also calibrated to community scale opportunities: Scaled down DNSP fee structures and prioritisation of projects of community significance by energy regulators ensure community aspirations are not left behind in the transition. 

Community energy projects can be better enabled through capped assessment costs, fast tracked assessment timelines, regulated revenue models for energy utilities that incentivise process innovation, and underwriting mechanisms for security of community investments. 

Third, dedicated funding is required to support the establishment of community governance entities to participate in the benefit from the transition and retain and reinvest a share of the reward locally rather than replicate extractive energy industry practices. 

If the Marlinja microgrid success story teaches us anything, it’s that when our communities lead, everybody wins. It’s now time to scale these community-led solutions with policies and programs that support the Territory’s need and ability to foster a faster, fairer transition to a clean energy future. TQ 

ETHAN GODFREY INSTALLING THE MICROGRID