In this episode of Tangled, I talk to Dylan Gower. Dylan is an architect by trade, but in this interview, we discuss a community energy project that he leads. The organisation is based in Cowra, a town in central New South Wales, a few hours drive west from Sydney. The group is called CLEAN, which stands for Cowra Local Energy Action Network.

The longterm aim for CLEAN is to develop a decentralised energy network for their local community, by digesting organic matter from agricultural, industrial and residential sources to produce biogas. This gas can then be used to generate electricity and thermal energy. And then by-products from the biogas production can be used by farms, factories and other businesses.

This project interests me because Dylan and his collaborators are trying to look holistically at the way humans use resources. It’s a commonsense approach that we need if we want to design systems that can work for the long term, without relying on fossil fuels. There are good reasons why we have used fossil fuels for the past couple of hundred years. They’ve been cheap to mine. They’re extremely energy dense. And you can store and transport them easily. But if we want to have any chance of weaning ourselves off these sources of energy, we need to design elegant systems that effectively make use of locally available resources. This is what Dylan is trying to do with CLEAN Cowra.

In theory, once the system is set up in Cowra, it could provide the community not only with renewable energy, but also a way to filter water, increase soil fertility, reduce reliance on government subsidies, innoculate them from geopolitical shifts with regard to trade and energy policies, regenerate local ecosystems, provide ongoing employment and entrepreneurial opportunities, and show other communities how they can implement similar systems. Dylan didn’t pay me to say this, but I honestly struggle to think of any downsides to pursuing the project.

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Show Notes

02:50 Dylan introduces CLEAN Cowra, describing the group’s aims and how it originated

03:50 Dylan’s background as an architect interested in ecological sustainable development and renewable energy

04:30 Looking at how bio-energy is relevant to regional communities

05:36 NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, Sustainability Advantage program

05:50 Doing a resource audit to map the region’s known available relevant resources: agricultural, industrial, horticultural, animal husbandry, municipal waste

07:20 Some challenges Dylan has faced, eg getting traction with community members and potential stakeholders

08:20 Using principles and language of design thinking: iterating over time

09:04 Starting with a broad, overarching project, and then realising it was necessary to hone in and focus on specific aspects in isolation

09:36 How to distribute energy locally?

10:45 Microgrids allow distribution of electricity, but then how to distribute thermal energy? And CO2. And other by-products from the initial processes.

11:10 Discussing the distribution of thermal energy

12:00 Many greenhouses burn LPG just to produce CO2 for the plants

12:20 CLEAN proposes to co-locate greenhouses near the bio-energy plant, which would be mutually beneficial