The Energy Southern Queensland (EnergySQ) program will help you understand and manage your on-farm energy consumption, and identify ways to reduce your energy spend and carbon footprint. Any farms in the Southern Downs, Western Downs, Toowoomba, Goondiwindi, Lockyer Valley and Scenic Rim regional council areas can participate. You can either participate individually or in a ‘cluster’ of farms in your local area.
The EnergySQ program will help you understand and identify ways to reduce your on-farm energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. To do this, we will work with you to:
Who can participate?
Any farm located in the Southern Downs, Western Downs, Toowoomba, Goondiwindi, Lockyer Valley and Scenic Rim Regional Council areas.
How much does it cost?
The program is free for participating farms.
What can I expect?
QFF will work with you to review your energy consumption and farm operations to understand your current energy use profile. Once we have an understanding of your consumption and farm operations, we will work with you to develop an Energy and Carbon Action Plan identifying tangible ways to reduce your energy consumption and to lower your carbon emissions.
How can I participate?
There are two ways for farms to participate: as an individual or in a ‘cluster’ of farms in your local area.
1. Individual Farms
2. Cluster
A ‘cluster’ is where a group of farms work their way through the program as a collective. As a collective group, we will take you through the program and run a series of short workshops to help you navigate the process. This provides a great way for you to share your experiences with your peers which will hopefully see you get more out of the program.
Please click HERE for more information on any of these stages.
*Note that the program expanded to service the Western Downs and Toowoomba in October 2023 and Lockyer Valley and the Scenic Rim in March 2024.
RCS Australia have conducted an additional 10 carbon audits and decarbonisation plans with:
Emissions baselined and a summary of avoided or absorbed emissions:
QFF have partnered with ACCIONA Energía Australia to fund the delivery of this project. ACCIONA Energía are developing the MacIntyre Wind Farm near Warwick.
This program is part of the QFF and ACCIONA Energía Carbon Savers initiative.
We will try and get to the assessment as soon as we can. We will try and group the site visits so that we can visit a few farms in a trip to make the program more efficient. We will therefore schedule the visit to your farm to coincide with a few others.
Before we attend site, we will do a review of your bills and energy data to be able to give you some feedback about your energy consumption when we get there. So we will need all that information ahead of our site visit so we can make our visit to you valuable.
We will be doing an assessment similar to a Type 1 Energy Audit and we will be looking at some of your carbon emissions as well.
In some cases in the Energy and Carbon Action Plan, we may suggest more detailed assessments or audits for some pumps, processes or machines.
An accurate carbon footprint for a farm can be complex and is not in scope for this project, however we can help you understand your emissions. We will assess the carbon emissions from your energy consumption and some on-farm processes such as fertiliser use and from this we will be able to give you an approximate level of emissions from these aspects of your farm. The accuracy of this will be dependent on the information available to our team and we will discuss this process with you.
We will also discuss with you the next steps in working out a carbon footprint and a pathway to decarbonisation and net zero.
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