Behind the Meter Solar PV Funding Guidebook is an ARENA supported initiative by Frontier Carbon, with support from the Coalition for Community Energy members Embark and Community Power Agency.
Click here to download a pdf version of the Behind the Meter Solar PV Funding Guidebook.
This guidebook is part of a Funding Toolkit that has been developed to assist community energy (CE) project proponents in the development and delivery of community renewable energy projects.
The Funding Toolkit is designed to be a centralised, simplified and accessible repository of information to support the funding of community energy projects throughout the various stages of the project development process.
The aim of this particular guidebook is to provide assistance specifically to solar photovoltaic (PV) projects that are installed “behind the meter”, i.e. on a host site where the electricity is purchased by the host site rather than selling the electricity into the electricity market via the main electricity network (grid). A good example is a local club that installs a PV project on its roof and uses the energy for its own purposes.
There are other types of CE projects including bio-energy that can be applied to Behind the Meter projects but, for simplicity, this guidebook focuses on solar PV as it is currently the most common technology type for Behind the Meter projects including in the CE sector (as evidenced by the project list in Appendix A).
This guidebook is designed to be used in conjunction with the ‘Funding Basics Guidebook for Community Energy Projects’ to assist project developers to understand the minimum criteria that should generally be met at each stage of project development to assist in achieving successful project funding.
Community energy is where a community comes together to develop, deliver and benefit from a clean energy project CE projects are considered to be ones that involve the community undertaking a number of the following activities:
- Initiating
- Developing
- Operating
- Owning and/or
- Benefiting from a renewable energy project.
Any of the first four of these items is sufficient for the project to be considered within the scope of the toolkit.
This guidebook concentrates on Behind the Meter operating models. The three basic network connection models are described below. The first two fall into the Behind the Meter category, while the third category (Grid-Connected) is beyond the scope of this guidebook.
Project partners and funders
