Festival of Energy lights up community with low cost ideas
NICCOLEY Nixon is just one Dubbo resident suffering from the stress of an electricity bill which seemed out of control. So when the Aboriginal housing Office staged a Festival of Energy in Dubbo, she was down in a flash to talk to the Energy Ombudsman.
“I came to get help with my electricity bill because it’s really high, I can’t afford to pay all of it so I came down to see who could help me,” Niccoley said.
“The lady just explained to me the thing that I should be looking at compared to the estimate the electricity company has made and they could be wrong with most of it, putting more than it should be on there and she explained to me what most of it means. “It’s great they’ve put this on,” she said. The festival was brought to Dubbo after research showed our city had the dubious honor of being second worst in the state when it came to people’s power being disconnected through an inability to pay the bills.
Shane Hamilton is CEO for the Aboriginal Housing Office (AHO) and said with 150 properties in the city, an investigation of energy costs showed there was a major problem, a partnership with startup Fouth¢re showed the Festival was a must-do.
“We recognised that there needed to be a massive education program around what tariffs mean, what that means to the cost of your energy, use of appliances what to do when you get into financial hardship with big energy bills and where is the assistance,” Hamilton said.
“It’s about how we can better inform our tenants to not rack up big, massive electricity bills which has a big impact on tenants, they’re then unable to pay rent because of those costs and that then puts their tenancy in jeopardy and it all spirals.
“It may sound strange that we’re focusing on this but it has other flow-on benefit effects if not managed well so it’s all about we sustain our tenancies and part of that is keeping their costs down, making sure they can afford to pay their rent and energy we know plays such a big big part,” he said.
He said a major problem faced by many Aboriginal households is that they’re made up of extended family, which can add up to far greater usage of power.
“We know there’s a lot of overcrowding and that overcrowding has a big impact and bearing on energy costs in a lot of households so I think some of the challenges are a little bit different for some of our tenants and their families and I think people are trying to do as much as they can to keep warm in winter or keep cool in summer,” Hamilton said.
“What we’re trying to do is twofold, both to keep energy costs down and also to provide some comfort for our tenants at the same time.
“One of the other things we looked at is a report that was written by the department of health which was focused around Aboriginal housing, particularly around those people that have particular health challenges and the impact that particularly when it’s hot in summer has on them living in houses that don’t have any sort of air conditioning or passive solutions to keeping cool,” he said.
Mr Hamilton said a critical component of awareness raising by events such as the Festival of Energy is the gathering of information and data to better inform the AHO about design of houses into the future.
“Whether we can actually get to the point where maybe our design, actually we won’t need to have things like air conditioning or have so many – the design is in such a way that it either doesn’t require or requires very little in the way of heating or cooling and again that’ll keep energy costs down,” he said.
“In this day and age there’s lots of different types of designs, not just in Australia but overseas and I think there’s lots of things we can learn from – to better inform the design of house in remote or regional parts of NSW or other parts of Australia where weather is extreme, we’ve got hot or cold, and you can just design houses in a way that have those passive energy saving aspects to it.”
Meantime, while strategists are working out just how to design homes far more suited to the extremes of hot and cold, Fourth¢re’s director Tessa Manning said events like the Festival of Energy need to be expanded across the state to ensure people can do the best with what they have.
“We’ve got all of providers of programs and services that support people with energy bills here giving them really practical, useful advice and in some cases signing them up for programs and services on the spot,” Manning said.
“We’ve got a whole heap of presentations, interactive workshops and all that kind of stuff where people can learn how to save energy and in the home and how to access those programs and support services to help them.
“It’s extremely difficult to understand energy bills, I think that experience is what most people have, I know I find my energy bill really hard to understand, particularly as they’re very very technical documents and energy’s a very technical thing and I think it’s often in the interests of the energy companies to make them technical and hard to understand.
She said the real nature of the skyrocketing energy costs was brought home when families told how they had to sacrifice or prioritise just to keep surviving.
“It becomes difficult to feed your family, to do the basic things that we take for granted, to wash in warm water, to wash your clothes and make sure everything’s clean in your home and it’s really sad the impact it can have on people's’ lives,” Manning said.