Australia’s first Indigenous-owned solar farm, connected to a power grid, has been officially opened in the remote Northern Territory community of Marlinja. Thanks to this new solar and storage project residents will now be saving over 70% on their electricity bills and that’s going to have a significant impact on their lives.

Marlinja’s energy was previously supplied by a hybrid gas and diesel power station run by the NT Power and Water Corporation. It was delivered to the community by a 25 kilometer feeder line. When something went wrong, the community would loose power and help would be slow to arrive.

According to Chantelle Johns, who has lived there for about seven years. “These blackouts can be from ten minutes to 4 or 5 days. And when we get a black out of power we also lose water in the whole community as well. The pumps and everything switch off.”

“Towards the end of last year, which was also peak flooding time for the community, where we get completely cut off from the highway, we actually experienced a 3 day blackout, but that also caused 3 weeks worth of no water as well because the utilities and all them couldn’t actually get to us.”

This project came about with the help of the people at Original Power, who together with the Marlinja community raised $750,000 from benefactors to pay for the infrastructure. Lauren Mellor from Original Power helped the community negotiate with the NT government terms for connecting to its grid. “It means that the government-owned power corporation will be saving on avoided diesel generation costs from the Elliott power station, so it’s a win-win for both it and the community.”

I am surprised, how this hasn’t this happened before and a decade ago? Given how much subsidies go to Fossil Fuels in Australia. We should have hundreds of communities like this set up already. Fingers crossed this will spur on similar projects like this in the near future.

I encourage anyone who can donate to Original Power to do so on this link and check out their great work https://www.originalpower.org.au/donate

Also visit The First Nations Clean Energy website and find out more about their work in this space: https://www.firstnationscleanenergy.org.au/ Their work features in this post https://owgf.org/2024/02/23/first-nations-and-renewable-energy-projects/

All photos by: Rachel Mounsley

---

This post was created in #WordPress and can be viewed in the #Fedivers at: @owgf.org@owgf.org

OWGF has a Fediverse companion profile at: https://mastodon.world/@OWGF

OWGF is also on #Pixelfed here: https://pixelfed.social/OWGFhttps://pixelfed.social/OWGF