Empowering Energy Ready Communities

As the climate crisis intensifies, devastating bushfires, floods, cyclones and heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe. Communities confronting this new reality face the urgent and daunting challenge of building resilient and flexible power systems and reimagining their relationship with energy.

Energy Ready is a practical toolkit that helps communities to build more resilient energy systems in response to devastating natural disasters. Its user-friendly guidebook and workshop materials empower communities to plan an energy future that not only recognises the hazards they face but also reflects their unique circumstances, values and priorities.

A photo of the Energy Ready Toolkit box, which is bright yellow with bold black text and icon style illustrations

A photo of an array of components from the Energy Ready toolkit, including a booklet, worksheets and various cards, along with pens and pencils.

An adaptable toolkit

Energy Ready helps communities build the social, cultural and technological resilience to adapt and thrive in a changing climate. The toolkit is based around seven workshop activities that guide communities through a process of reflecting on their character and values, imagining a vision for their future, understanding the hazards they face, defining their priorities, exploring how they could respond and making a clear and practical plan of action.

The toolkit provides communities with a straightforward process for developing a plan when they may feel overwhelmed or confused. At the same time, the toolkit materials are designed to be flexible so that communities can start where they’re at or adapt the contents to suit their needs.

What set Parallel Lines apart was their dedication to ensuring that communities’ insights and needs drove the purpose, concept and direction of the project. Their ability to take abstract, research-heavy concepts and transform them into compelling, intuitive, and engaging designs was truly remarkable.

Dr Carol Valente

Executive Manager, Energy Consumers Australia

Made with communities, for communities

Parallel Lines worked with Energy Consumers Australia, Community Power Agency and UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures to create the Energy Ready toolkit. Together, we translated insights from communities, researchers and experts into an accessible and useful community resource.

Working with six diverse communities—Magnetic Island, Gympie, Mullumbimby, Lake Macquarie, Bonang and Mornington Peninsula—provided a strong foundation for our design response. Energy Ready foregrounds stories and insights from these communities along with others who have been through disasters.

A photo of people around a table, discussing notes on large piece of paper.

Community workshop participants (photo courtesy UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures)

Image from Empowering Energy Ready Communities

Elianor and Kristy, from Community Power Agency, facilitating a community workshop (photo courtesy UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures)

A ring-bound booklet with pages divided into three sections—top, middle and bottom, that can be individually turned.

The ‘Priorities Explorer’ flipbook, which allows readers to mix and match people, needs and situations.

Our work was also guided by a group of experts in electrical infrastructure, emergency management and community energy who helped us to understand the complex systems and technologies related to disaster response and energy resilience. This gave us a strong understanding of the opportunities and challenges communities are likely to face when dealing with governments and network providers.

Energy Ready is the result of a collaborative and participatory design approach that empowers community action. It broadens the scope of energy resilience to help communities build the social, cultural and technological infrastructure that can make them stronger, safer and more connected.

This privacy policy outlines how Parallel Lines collects and manages information about you. If you have questions or concerns about this policy, please contact us by emailing info@parallellines.design.

This privacy policy may change from time to time. It was last updated on 5 February 2023.

Information we collect

Personal information

Personal Information is information that identifies an individual. The Personal Information we collect includes names, email addresses and phone numbers. We may obtain this information in different ways, including:

Through interviews or discussions.
By telephone, email or social media correspondence.
From publicly available sources.
From third parties.

We collect Personal Information for the primary purpose of providing and marketing our services. We may also use your Personal Information for secondary purposes closely related to the primary purpose, in circumstances where you would reasonably expect such use or disclosure.

When we collect your Personal Information we will, where appropriate and where possible, explain to you why we are collecting the information and how we plan to use it.

Sensitive information

Sensitive Information is a type of information that requires a higher level of protection. Sensitive Information includes your race or ethnicity, gender or sexual identity, political opinions, membership of a political association, religious or philosophical beliefs, membership of a trade union or other professional body, criminal record or health information.

We will only use Sensitive Information:

With your consent; or where required or authorised by law.
For the primary purpose for which it was obtained; typically, this relates to a specific design project.
For a secondary purpose that is directly and reasonably related to the primary purpose.

Case Study: Energy Ready