Results of Community Surveys

Alice Springs has a strong his­to­ry of renew­able ener­gy inno­va­tion, along with enthu­si­asm across the com­mu­ni­ty for the adop­tion of rooftop solar pan­els. Accord­ing to recent esti­mates from the Aus­tralian PV Insti­tute, more than one-in-five dwellings in the Alice Springs local gov­ern­ment area now has rooftop solar PV installed, with this num­ber expect­ed to con­tin­ue to rise. 

Recog­nis­ing that there is now a need to diver­si­fy the tech­nol­o­gy mix to sup­port fur­ther renew­able ener­gy in the grid, the team at Alice Springs Future Grid project want­ed to start the project with find­ing out about the community’s appetite in this space.

First Com­mu­ni­ty sur­vey con­duct­ed in 2021

Before rolling out any project activ­i­ties, a sam­ple of Alice Springs res­i­dents were sur­veyed to explore cur­rent lev­els of knowl­edge and aware­ness of renew­able ener­gy, as well as exist­ing lev­els of engage­ment with tech­nolo­gies such as solar pow­er and bat­tery stor­age systems. 

Sev­er­al meth­ods were used to recruit a diverse cross-sec­tion of par­tic­i­pants, includ­ing cir­cu­la­tion of an online sur­vey to all Alice Springs Jacana Ener­gy cus­tomers which had reg­is­tered email address­es. In addi­tion, a field team from McGre­gor Tan, mar­ket research con­sul­tant, under­took some face-to-face and tele­phone surveying.

In Jan­u­ary 2023, the com­mu­ni­ty was sur­veyed once again, this time via an online sur­vey, cir­cu­lat­ed through Jacana Ener­gy Cus­tomers in Alice Springs, the Alice Springs Future Grid Mail­ing List and social media (McGre­gor Tan did not under­take face-to-face and tele­phone sur­vey­ing this time). 

Below you can see a snap­shot of some of the results in a fact sheet com­piled by Project Part­ner ALEC, which is lead­ing the com­mu­ni­ty-fac­ing ele­ments of Future Grid.

You can down­load the snap-shot results from 2020 HERE.

A snap­shot of some of the 2023 results are in a fact sheet below. 

Community attitudes towards renewable energy 2023