10: Dylan Gower – Decentralised Community Energy

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. If you find the show interesting, please

You can listen to 10: Dylan Gower – Decentralised Community Energy online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

10: Dylan Gower – Decentralised Community Energy is an episode from Tangled by Julian De Lorenzo.

This episode is 00:35:08 long.

This episode was published on Jul 16, 2019.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Tangled when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.