A push to make Wollongong's northern suburbs the first all-electric community in Australia is gathering pace with hundreds already signing up within days of its launch.
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The 2515 postcode, which stretches from Thirroul to Clifton, is ripe to become the first "town" to "electrify everything", organisers say.
A group of residents is pushing for their locality to sign up for a pilot scheme, which could involve houses being given all-electric appliances, a solar storage battery, and an electric car for the two-year pilot.
They would not be free but the plan is that the up-front costs would be covered within the two-year pilot.
Engineer and energy entrepreneur Saul Griffith, who lives at Austinmer, has grabbed the attention of leaders from Tasmania to the White House with his conviction that turning households fully electric could slash carbon emissions and save people money.
The next step was to find a suburb or locality willing to be the pilot program for an electrified community, to show how it can be done - and replicated elsewhere.
Thirroul designer Trent Jansen, 40, said 10 local parents were driving the move, meeting with Dr Griffith and making a film and website to encourage community support - and interest had been strong already.
"We ticked over 400 today - the number we [had] as a target was 500 ... to have a pretty good chance," he said.
"Electrifying a home is about doing six things," he said. "Solar panels on your roof, a battery to store that energy, changing your space heating, water heating, and cooking to electric. Then the big one for everyone is the car."
If enough get on board they will, along with Dr Griffth's Rewiring Australia, seek new funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and state and federal governments.
They are hopeful appliance and even vehicle manufacturers will also be keen to get on board - the vision is each household could get an electric car, for which they would pay 4c a kilometre for the two years.
"We just don't know how generous the subsidies would be - but they would be above and beyond what is available at the moment," Mr Jansen said.
"This all sounds incredible and optimistic, but the general theme from our meetings with Saul is that we don't know the actual form this is going to take, but we do know it will save people money over those two years."
He said one of the important gains from an all-electric pilot would be testing whether the power grid could handle power sharing, or what upgrades were needed.
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