The Goulburn Community Solar Farm is a rare thing in Australian energy: a solar and battery project fully owned by the community it serves. Some 300 mostly local investors, alongside NSW Government support, backed the Goulburn Community Energy Cooperative through twelve years of planning and persistence before the farm was officially opened in early 2026. Every project like this lives or dies at the grid connection, and sitting right at that boundary is a TWS HV metering unit.
Community projects don't move like utility projects. Specifications evolve, approvals involve multiple parties, and the people driving the project are often navigating network connection requirements for the first time. Over the course of this one, our role went well beyond manufacturing. We helped the project team and their contractors understand who actually needed to sign off on the connection, what the network company required of the metering design, and which options were worth pursuing and which weren't. When the design was being reconsidered mid-stream, we held production rather than charging ahead, and when asked about cancellation fees during an uncertain patch, our answer reflected how we like to do business: we'd rather absorb a bit of engineering time than penalise a community group finding its way.
Then came the crunch. The project had a network outage booked for early December to make the connection, and the unit had to be on the ground in Goulburn beforehand. With our production schedule full in peak season, we worked with another customer to swap delivery slots, re-sequenced our Christchurch workshop to bring the Goulburn unit forward, and dispatched it in late October. We shared live freight and vessel tracking so the site team could watch it cross the Tasman, and the unit landed in Sydney with time to spare before the outage window.
Supplying from New Zealand into the Australian market is nothing new for us. Including via Sydney-based WF Energy Controls, Kinetica Energy has been supplying current transformers to Australia for more than a century, and our units are built and tested to the standards Australian networks require.
The farm is now generating clean energy and returning profits to the Goulburn community, including a fund to help locals struggling with energy costs. Being a small part of a project with that much heart is exactly why we do this.
At TWS, fast turnaround on critical components isn't the exception. It's what we're built for.
