Ballarat is home to several bioenergy experts and projects, but they've never been fully united to push for new opportunities until now.
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On Wednesday, representatives from a range of industries, as well as the City of Ballarat, Federation University, the Committee for Ballarat, and more, met to discuss how to promote bioenergy projects for the region.
In Skipton, a biomass generator is helping heat the hospital, saving thousands of dollars on gas costs, and that approach could be scaled up, experts say.
Ballarat's own Gaia Envirotech, a subsidiary of the world-famous Gekko Systems, has been running an anaerobic digester to power a busy Bungaree dairy farm for many years, while the City of Ballarat has repeatedly explored options for a waste-to-energy plant in the Ballarat West Employment Zone.
Gekko managing director Elizabeth Lewis-Gray said she was "sick of" the constant talk, and now was the time for action, particularly with the state government's push to set up food-organic and garden-organic (FOGO) recycling systems in the coming years.
"There has been a lot of studies and a lot of paperwork, for years and years and years," she said.
"I'm sick of people talking about "let's do a study" or "we could do this in three years" or "if we could only just change government policy" - that's not going to happen, we need to get bioenergy infrastructure in place now if we're going to get a change in people's attitudes and understandings."
She said a "centre of excellence", or innovation hub, could bring different streams of expertise together to promote investment opportunities and research into bioenergy.
An industry-led proposal is what's needed, and could have far-reaching benefits for new jobs as well as cost savings, Jim Dannock from the Australian Industry Group added.
"I think the western part of Victoria, out of Ballarat, has some real strengths around the industries in the area," he said.
"If you take where policies are at, where prices of gas are at, lots of regions have that problem, but Ballarat's got some real competitive advantages for doing it here and being the centre of bioenergy."
The push is supported by the Committee for Ballarat's chief executive Michael Poulton, who said right now, plenty of organic and landfill waste is not being used when it could be a valuable resource.
"I think the move towards a renewable energy future, or truly circular economy, is a whole range of inputs and technologies," he said.
"One of which is biomass and bioenergy, which has probably been the poor cousin of wind and solar - it also has the ability to deliver solutions that help take gas out of the network, and out of industry's costs, and then we're reducing those costs from industry and opening up innovation for them, that's a critical part."
Bioenergy expert Andrew Lang said the technology has already been in use across Europe for decades, and importantly, is scalable from small projects like the Skipton and Beaufort hospitals, right up to powering cities like Ballarat.
"There are lots of good examples, some of them would require a different sort of government support structure, or a carbon tax or something like that, but there's still a lot that's really cost-effective for us now," he said.
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"The technology's all available off the shelf now, it's just a matter of getting how it applies here, whether it's anaerobic digestion, or biomass to heat, or use of big square bales of straw that don't then have to get burned in the paddock."
From there, the sky is the limit, Ms Lewis-Gray said.
"From our point of view, we see at least 12 projects in the region that have potential and can get up and running, but if we can get government support to do that as a region, we can accelerate that process quite a lot," she said.
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