The Power of Community

The Jacka 2 community battery: An Analysis

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Community batteries offer an opportunity to shift fundamental perceptions of energy generation, by establishing it as a local and collective activity, while driving a broader global movement that could address some of the most complex challenges of our time - a necessary and urgent transition to a zero-emissions society.

The Jacka project will provide an invaluable test case for a range of operational models and optimisations that offer a complex set of trade-offs between different sets of values. The choice of model will determine which of a range divergent futures materialises for Jacka 2, potentially offering residents significant savings on their energy bills while building a strong sense of community identity as the beating heart of an innovative and sustainable new suburb.

New kinds of systems powered by machine learning present an increasingly complex set of choices and risks for developers that did not exist with more traditional systems. The various ways in which algorithms can be optimised raises multiple questions: Whose goals and values is the optimisation aligned to? Why is it being optimised in that manner? Who makes the decision on how it is optimised? Who benefits from the optimisation and who may be disadvantaged by it? Can the system be trusted to work fairly? During the design and management of the system, tensions and conflict may arise from the multiple choices available. This is difficult to communicate and end users can feel overwhelmed by the level of information, level of technicality and number of alternatives they need to assess in order to be left with a fair, efficient, cost-effective service. Meanwhile, making safe, responsible or sustainable evaluations of and decisions about the boundaries or limitations of a system can also sit in opposition to modern philosophies about the consumer’s right to choose - something the ACT Government is currently navigating at Jacka 2.

And these decisions matter.

As one of the first batteries on the east coast of Australia, the Jacka 2 project could provide other jurisdictions with not just a technical use case for this technology, but also a community engagement pathway for implementing their own community batteries in a way that is responsible, sustainable and safe.

Report

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