Our Mission

Cooperative Power is owned by members. Our first service is offering retail electricity with our product partner Energy Locals. They’re Australian based and operated, and share our goal of a sustainable and affordable energy future.

What is your relationship with Energy Locals?
Energy Locals is a provider making energy cheaper, cleaner, and fairer for Australia.

They also support us with a retail energy service so we can participate in the retail energy market. They sit behind the scenes most of the time but their team provide the customer support and send you your bills.

We both share similar values, but have different visions to achieve them. Energy Locals also provides its services for other organisations.

Energy Locals’ major investor is Quinbrook Infrastructure Partner who are a progressive, renewable energy infrastructure fund.

Do you supply 100% renewable energy?
Unfortunately not, no one can. The reality is that all retailers sell electricity from an energy grid made up of both clean and dirty energy, so even if you wanted to, you can’t opt in to only buy renewable energy.

We invest in community renewable energy and support GreenPower – a government accreditation scheme that lets you do a bit extra to help support new renewable generation in Australia.

Do you have GreenPower?
Yes, we support the government-accredited GreenPower program. You can choose to purchase 100%, 50% or 10% GreenPower.

Read on for a more detailed background about us.

Some more background on our mission

Cooperative Power’s mission is to address the climate crisis, unprecedented and growing inequality, and a decline in civil society participation. Our co-operative solution is to do this through delivering a range of environmentally-friendly energy services and products, facilitating democratic solutions to social and environmental problems, and assisting members and the community to transition away from fossil fuels for their energy needs.

Our first service is offering retail electricity with our product partner Energy Locals. Under our rules as a co-operative, we’re not allowed to make a profit, so we redirect the surplus from this service to meet our mission. During 2020, given the COVID-19 crisis we put 100% of this money to addressing the COVID-19 social crisis in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. In 2021, we built on this by building in the democratic practice of customer members proposing and voting on how we spend our electricity revenue. What we do in future years will evolve according to our collective and democratic practice.

Our Structure

CoPower (Co-operative Power Australia Limited, ABN 91 297 604 640) is a registered non-distributing co-operative. This means there are two key parts of our organisational structure. First, we are a co-operative. We run on a one member, one vote basis as opposed to a traditional corporation that runs on a one dollar, one vote basis. Second, we are not allowed to distribute any surplus from our activities to our member-owners. We have to reinvest back into the community in ways that fulfil our mission.

Check out our co-operative’s rules.

Our Members

Cooperative Power is owned by members. We are made up of member organisations that themselves must be democratic, member-led organisations including community organisations, trade unions and other co-operatives.

Our current members include:

• National Tertiary Education Union
• Environment Victoria 
• The Australian Services Union (Services and Authorities VIC/Tas Branch)
• The Australian Education Union
• The United Workers Union
• Ballarat Renewable Energy and Zero Emissions Inc
• The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (Victorian Branch)
• Union Aid Abroad – APHEDA
• Voices of the Valley
• Earthworker Cooperative
• Pre-Power Coop 1
• The Australian Education Union
• The Surf Coast Energy Group
• The Victorian Trades Hall Social Committee
• Friends of the Earth Melbourne
• The Energy Innovation Cooperative
• Australian Unemployed Workers Union
• Port Philip Energy Cooperative
• The Uniting Church of Australia Vic/Tas Synod

If you’d like your organisation to join up as a member and have a democratic say in how we fulfil our mission then feel free to contact us at hello at cooperativepower dot org dot au.