14. Tastex | solar PV

Project 14: Tastex Knitwear and Uniforms, Tas

Tastex’s founding purpose is to provide employment and training for people with intellectual disabilities and to be self-funding through its knitwear factory. Tastex is a “Special Work” of the St Vincent de Paul Society, and is an Australian Disability Enterprise.
http://tastex.com.au/

Project story…

This project was funded partly by donations directly to Tastex via their own local fundraising campaign. CORENA gave them confidence to attempt that by committing to give an interest-free loan to make up the shortfall, with their fundraising and ours running in parallel.

Tastex managed to raise much more than they expected from local supporters, with CORENA’s contribution amounting to less than half the overall cost of their 30kW solar installation.

Just after the solar PV was installed Tastex received an extra $5,000 towards it, so they immediately paid that $5,000 back to us. They then proceeded to send us the entire amount they saved on power bills each quarter instead of the agreed amount because they wanted to pay back our loan as quickly as possible. They ended up fully repaying our loan in less than 2 years instead of the 6+ years we had anticipated.

See what has been achieved via the CORENA loan to Tastex 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 fully funded via $10,531 in new donations and $7,308 in loan repayments

Honour roll

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

Donations directly to this project
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Big Win donations that were temporarily used for this project then later repaid to the Big Win funding stream where they helped fund the Enova Community Generator project and the Albert Landlord-Tenant solar project.

Status: Funded project – loan fully repaid
Loan amount: $17,839
Loan repayments: $710/quarter

Work details

30.68kW Solar PV:
115 x Trinasmart Solar 260 watt panels with Tigo optimisers
1 x 27 kilowatt Fronius Eco 3 phase inverter
1 x Gateway and Management Unit
1 x 3 phase smart meter
Cost: $37,041 + GST (Tastex raised $19,202 in donations directly to themselves, and the CORENA loan of $17,839 made up the difference)
Expected savings: From entire installation – 42,553 kWh/year, $7,053/year (with around $2,840/year via the portion lent by CORENA)

Reduction in carbon emissions/yr: Equivalent to 3.53 average households average households using renewable electricity instead of grid electricity (from CORENA funded portion)