2026 Tidy Towns Energy Finalist: Beechworth Community Battery
An 89kW battery bolted onto the Old Beechworth Gaol is about to do double duty: cutting emissions and keeping the lights on when the grid can't.
Indigo Power's BEECH01, part of the ARENA-funded Community Batteries for Resilience Project, pairs a 339kWh battery with new rooftop solar (installed on internal-facing roof sections to protect the heritage site's appearance) to store local solar generation and share it with participating households through the Beechworth Community Energy Hub. In a bushfire-prone region where the Gaol can serve as a relief centre, that stored power isn't just a bill saver. It's a backup plan for the town.
Modelling puts the numbers at 99.32 MWh of clean energy supplied to the site each year, 38.2 MWh shared with the community, and 54.39 tonnes of CO2-e avoided annually. During extended outages, critical circuits get priority while onsite solar keeps recharging the battery.
Indigo Power's key lesson from Beechworth and its earlier Yackandandah project: community batteries only work if they solve a real local problem, not just showcase new tech. Here, that meant designing around heritage constraints, existing solar infrastructure and a genuine emergency-resilience need, not just picking the easiest site.
The X-factor is what the Gaol becomes because of it: heritage, renewable energy and disaster resilience, doing their jobs in the same building.
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