Andrew Bray, the small town man who believes small towns matter

The director of RE-Alliance Andrew Bray says industry and government don’t fully appreciate how much they are asking of regional Australians in renewable energy zones.

Re-Alliance national director Andrew Bray says more need to be done to bring regional communities on the transition journey. Picture: Nic Walker

This article appears in The List: Top 100 Green Energy Players.

Andrew Bray remembers his “aha” moment well. It was in 2007 when he was living in regional Victoria’s Ballarat, and teaching music while also working as a computer programmer.

“I’d have to say this was a surprising twist in life,” he says. “I had started to get involved in the community acceptance of wind farms. It was really just the awareness of how devastating climate change would be for our society and having young kids at the time really made it something I just couldn’t ignore.”

Today Bray is the national director of RE-Alliance, a charitable organisation that provides support and education for regional communities undergoing a transition to green energy.

But back then he was the primary carer for his three children, along with his other work.

The wind farms caught his attention, he quit his job as a music lecturer and volunteered full time for the local sustainability group, writing articles in the local paper, talking to people about renewable energy, and running campaigns. In 2013 when RE-Alliance, then called the Wind Alliance, formed, Bray was its first paid employee.

He’s a big advocate for keeping regional communities up to date on the green energy transition.

“It seems obvious to me that a change of this magnitude has to happen at a social level, as well as a technology level,” says Bray. “We just need to bring people with us. It’s a philosophical sort of point of view I guess, but that was always pretty clear to me.”

The List, out in print and online on Friday, features Australia’s top green energy players.

Yet companies have taken years to understand the need to connect with local communities in terms of integrating infrastructure such as wind and solar farms.

“They have to engage properly with people on the ground,” he says. “I don’t think it’s unfair to say that when I started this role in 2013, they still weren’t. Only some of the companies were doing it.

“I think it was generally underestimated the challenges that were going to be in building these kinds of projects in the country and in the regions. When governments made large plans for renewables targets, they didn’t really clock the challenges they were going to face.”

As part of its advocacy, RE-Alliance also steps in to raise objection to projects when the communities have not been properly consulted; for example, in 2015 with the Jupiter Wind Farm proposal for the NSW Southern Tablelands. EPYC, an Australian-Spanish joint venture, had planned to develop the farm in Tarago, a small town about 200 kilometres southwest of Sydney.

“We objected to that particular wind farm in 2015 because we felt like it didn’t pass the community engagement test,” says Bray. “We always take a position that we stand outside the industry and so we try to keep the standards as high as we can.”

Bray says industry and government is yet to fully understand how much they are asking of regional Australians in renewable energy zones, where there are myriad wind, solar and transmission projects.

“They are being asked to get their heads around all of that when they’re just people going about their normal business, living their lives and sending their kids to school,” says Bray.