1. Tulgeen | community-funded solar PV

Project 1: Tulgeen Disability Services, NSW

Tulgeen Disability Services are located in Bega on the far south coast of NSW. Their services enhance the skills and lives of people with disability, enabling them to fulfill their greatest potential through Employment, In-home Support, and Training & Education services.
Website: https://tulgeen.com.au/

Project story…

The CORENA loan funded solar PV for their cheese-packing workspace and their TES day programmes building in November 2013. We’ll always be grateful that Tulgeen took a punt on us at a time when the CORENA funding model was as yet unproven. This project provided us with ‘proof of concept’ and our first case study, making all our subsequent projects possible.

It took 6 months to raise the $12,000 for this project, partly because we were doing something new and were not yet well known, and partly because we did not yet have earlier projects making loan repayments to help us reach the fundraising target. But after that everything went smoothly. Tulgeen not only added yet more solar PV but also managed to pay back our loan in 3 years. Their first 2 repayments were particularly welcome in helping us reach the loan target for our second project at Gawler Community House in SA.

See what has been achieved via the CORENA loan to Tulgeen so far

* The MWh figure is the amount of grid electricity avoided by solar electricity generation and energy efficiency measures. The resultant reductions in carbon emissions can be visualised as an equivalent number of average households switching from grid electricity to 100% renewable electricity, noting that the subsequent projects have been avoiding grid electricity for less time than the original project.

This project has been fully funded- Thank you!

Progress bar showing funding via $12,000 in new donations

Honour roll

Thanks to all the people who have donated to this project.

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Status: Funded project – loan fully repaid
Loan amount: $12,000
Loan repayments: Instalments of $1,000/qtr over 3 yrs

Loan repayment table - loan fully repaid

Work details

Cheese packing workspace – 4kW of SolarWorld Polycrystalline 250 watt panels with a 5kW SMA ‘Sunny Boy’ “Tripower”
three phase inverter
TES day activities – 3kW of SolarWorld Polycrystalline 250 watt panels with a 5kW SMA 5000TL inverter
Cost: Total cost for both systems approx $18,000 ($12,000 loan from CORENA with remainder paid
by Tulgeen themselves)
Expected savings:
Cheese packing workspace – 1,450 kWh/qtr, $522/qtr
TES day activities – 1,067 kWh/qtr, $387/qtr
Total savings – 10,068 kWh/yr; $3,636/yr (but Tulgeen chose to repay $1,000/qtr in order to pay off the loan in 3 years)

Reduction in carbon emissions/yr: Equivalent to 1.81 average households using renewable electricity instead of grid electricity

Progress report from Tulgeen CEO, April 5, 2015

Tulgeen added an extra 3kW of solar panels in April 2015. This makes use of the extra capacity in the two 5kW inverters installed as part of the original 7kW system installed with CORENA assistance in November 2013.

From Pete Gorton, Chief Executive Officer –

Tulgeen Disability Group has added 3kW of additional SolarWorld panels to its existing 7kW system, which was purchased with support from CORENA. The system has met its goals, demonstrating savings in CO2 emissions and dollar savings. We are able to provide increased support and service diversity from our limited amount of funding, as we are wasting less on purchasing energy, to provide support for its 50 people with disability. We are keen to add more, cost-effective solar generation in the future.