A 5th Birthday, 10,000+ Customers and named best energy provider by CHOICE - Let's Celebrate!

Welcome to our blog where we share the highlights of Enova's 5th birthday community celebration with you.

10,000+ Customers

In the spirit of putting people and the planet first, Enova proudly celebrated with our shareholders, local customers, team members and friends recently, at a party to acknowledge five years in operation and having surpassed the signing on of our 10,000th customer!

Felicity Stening, CEO, speaking at Enova's 5th birthday community celebration:

"Today I do feel overwhelmed by the support and gratitude from our community. I want to say a huge thank you to our shareholders, customers, our supporters and our contractors for all that you have given and all that you have shared with us over the last five years." 

Enova's 5th Birthday

What's a party without great food and ice cream? 

Thank you to the amazing OCA Cuisines for their outstanding catering and to Knox and Aya who brought their delicious locally made coconut ice cream truck. 

There's nothing like singing and music to bring people together. So that's exactly what we did! We took some time out to play some drums together with Talkin' The Drum before catching up with old and new friends, and it was a really special way to celebrate Enova's achievements.

We were able to thank Enova's original supporters, shareholders and customers who five years ago played an instrumental role in getting us off the ground. 

Alison Crook AO, Chair Enova Community Energy, speaking at the 5th Birthday Community Celebration:

"We started with the battle for Bentley... that's where we came from and we saw how strong community could be and what we could stop. We also realised that it was an opportunity to show that we could do without gas, we didn't need gas and we as a community could be energy self-sufficient." 

Alison went on to tell the story of the small contingent who travelled to the Coalition for Community Energy conference and came back inspired to create a local community-owned energy model: "We came back from that conference and called together a group of people interested in community generation and we thought, what is it that's really needed? We understood then that it was a community-owned retailer that was really needed - because community generation was one thing, but you also need someone to sell that energy."

"We also knew from the outset that we wanted to create a community-based model. We wanted to do that because we wanted to give everyone the chance to act on climate change and to do something about reducing their carbon emissions in a practical sense. We knew we had the capability in this region to be self-sufficient - just as we can be with food and water. We knew we had the opportunity to be self-sufficient in energy and to create a different model that could also be a model for other regions."

"We knew that over $300 million was leaving this region on people's power bills and that was money we wanted to keep circulating in this community to help us be more resilient. Very foundational to it all was that we wanted to ensure that everyone could participate in the shift to renewables."

Alison finished up by sharing the story of the community meetings, crowdfunding, investment raising and company-building that ensued, right up to the point of signing on Enova's first customer in 2016.  Many of those original shareholders, supports and investors were in attendance at this community celebration. 

Felicity Stening, CEO Enova Community Energy speaking at the 5th Birthday Community Celebration:

"One of the things that I'm really proud of is that we're not trying to do everything on our own. We recognise that there are a lot of other community energy groups (COREM, Zero Emissions Byron and Resilient Byron are just some of our local organisations) that put in a lot of hard yards before we came along; and we've learnt from them, we've shared information with them, we'll continue to knowledge share as we grow.

"We've been breaking a lot of new ground with solar gardens, microgrids, community batteries, even the way we deliver energy with transparent and simple plans. We are bringing in renewable energy systems that are localised and decentralised to fortify us against climate impacts, natural disasters and also so that there's local energy that can be generated from wind and solar farms, hydro, local house and business rooftop solar and storage systems; so, we've got interconnected systems that mean that power should be cheaper over time."

Felicity highlighted Enova's most recent achievements to rousing cheers from the audience: our 5th anniversary, reaching beyond 10,400 customers and being named best energy provider in NSW and Queensland for our customer service and environmental record by CHOICE. 

After all of the official proceedings and acknowledgements, it was time to cut the cake. It was quite a bit of fun singing a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday Dear Enova!" with our guests. 

It was a great and memorable party, and we're looking forward to what the next five years hold, with many thanks for your ongoing participation and support.