The Hub Foundation’s Jo Kaptein gave some clues about the organisation’s plans for 2016 in a Vox Pop interview published in the Castlemaine Mail on Friday 27 November 2015. Solar will continue to be a big focus of the Foundation’s work in 2016 with projects to provide more solar for low income and homeless people, a MASH3 and feasibility work on a large-scale community-owned solar farm in Mount Alexander Shire.
We are excited about the potential for solar in this Shire. MASH is going great guns. Since September 2014, over 350 homes in our region have had a MASH solar PV rooftop installed. This is saving 1,700 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year, about the same as 350 less cars on our roads.
We know that to help the remaining 75% of households in our Shire to get solar, we have to be pretty creative. And that means thinking big. That’s why we are starting to talk to different parties about building a big solar farm in our Shire that would benefit the community and have community ownership. This type of project is happening in many places across Australia so we reckon, why not in Mt Alexander Shire too?, said Kaptein.