The City of Melbourne has a goal for Melbourne to be 100% powered by renewable energy by 2030, and is committed to supporting and championing renewable energy initiatives that will help them achieve this goal.
City of Melbourne residents and businesses face significant barriers to installing rooftop solar, due to limited control over rental or strata properties, lack of access to suitable rooftop spaces and the risk of overshadowing by future developments. These challenges prompted the City of Melbourne to explore innovative ways for residents and businesses to access renewable energy.
MAKE and CoM collaborated on two projects to develop and test prototypes and value propositions for renewable energy models with CoM residents and businesses. Each project engaged residents and business owners in individual interviews or small group workshops to ensure that insight into the community’s needs and behaviour was baked into the development of concepts and solutions.
Exploratory co-design to understand needs and barriers
Our initial project focused on exploratory, co-design sessions about community energy, to understand resident and business needs, barriers and preferences. We applied behavioural design methodologies to diagnose motivations and barriers for audience cohorts and identify potential markets for different energy models.
Working in a blended team with the City of Melbourne, we tested and refined assumptions and hypotheses about the desirability of community energy, to identify what would need to be true for a local renewable energy solution to be successful in Melbourne. We delivered clear recommendations for the next steps to develop an accessible renewable energy product.
Prototyping a retail renewable energy offering
After the conclusion of our initial project, the City of Melbourne team continued to build partnerships, including with Victorian Greenhouse Alliances councils and energy retailers, to develop renewable energy models. The team approached MAKE to design a value proposition for a renewable energy retail product, including understanding the value of community batteries to City of Melbourne residents and businesses.
This work defined the role of council and a retail partner in the service model, and identified the key features and messages that resonated most with customers. Community batteries were identified as a tangible way to make the renewable energy offering visible and help to address concerns, particularly from business customers, about the reliability of renewable energy.
“The market research and design sprints undertaken with MAKE generated a huge volume of deep insights and practical ideas –
it has informed literally everything we do in community energy”
Liam Henderson
Principal – Energy and Carbon, Climate Change and City Resilience, City of Melbourne
MAKE’s work with CoM fed directly into the design Power Melbourne – CoM’s flagship project to establish a network of community batteries around the city, with the batteries linked to a retail electricity plan to help renters, people living in apartments, and those running small businesses access more affordable renewable electricity.
MAKE’s work also informed the communications and value proposition for Power Melbourne, as it was taken to the next stage of community consultations, including determining community battery locations. Understanding the community's needs when it comes to information and understanding renewable energy, in particular, helped to shape the way the offering was explained. We also identified the important role community batteries play in making renewable energy tangible and how they contribute to placemaking for the City of Melbourne.
Our visualisation of the energy model (above), was developed and iterated to be a clear and concise way of communicating a complex concept and has been used extensively by CoM to explain the Power Melbourne offering and their role in the model.
Community energy projects are always bespoke, and need to be tailored to the needs and context of the community. Power Melbourne has been designed from a deep understanding of the barriers that City of Melbourne residents and businesses face in adopting renewable energy, in particular the inability to install their own solar panels and affordability of retail renewable energy products.
Power Melbourne seeks to make renewable electricity more affordable, by using income from the batteries to subsidise renewable energy projects, with an affordable retail offering in the pipeline.
Find out more about Power Melbourne on the Participate Melbourne site.
