RE-Alliance

RE-Alliance

RE-Alliance launched in 2013 as an independent not-for-profit working across Australia to embed regional community interests into the country’s accelerating energy transition. Founder and National Director Andrew Bray built the organization around the premise that rural and regional Australians — who host the turbines, solar arrays and transmission lines — should lead the decisions that govern those projects. The group’s founding thesis treats First Nations people as rightsholders in the shift, a posture it formalized through its launch partnership with the First Nations Clean Energy Network. The organization does not invest its own balance sheet but functions as a structural intermediary between communities, industry and government. Its work spans on-the-ground capacity building for regional landholders, policy submissions to state and federal regulators, and public-facing campaigns such as “Renewables Done Right” that document how communities secure local procurement, jobs and revenue from projects. RE-Alliance operates across multiple Australian states — recent submissions include the Western Australia Renewable Energy Planning Framework (April 2026) and a review of supply connection infrastructure regulation in New South Wales (April 2026) — and it partners with groups like Farmers for Climate Action on reports including “Farm Powered.” Mike Cannon-Brookes’ philanthropic vehicle Boundless Earth is a major disclosed funder. The team is small, distributed mostly along Australia’s east coast in regional areas, and governed by a volunteer board chaired by Anna Hancock, who also serves as Executive Director at Pollination Group. In May 2026, RE-Alliance convened a New England Renewable Energy Zone Forum in Armidale, NSW, where local councils and community leaders coordinated responses to the cumulative impacts of development — a signal that its model now carries enough weight to convene multi-party regional talks. Its 2024–25 annual report, published in November 2025, captures a year of expanding policy engagement as renewables crossed 40% of Australia’s electricity generation. RE-Alliance’s structural differentiator is that it acts as a non-capital-deploying governance layer in an infrastructure boom dominated by developers and institutional capital. While most energy-transition organizations either build projects or lobby for them, RE-Alliance engineers the procedural rules — planning frameworks, community benefit-sharing mechanisms, end-of-life protocols for assets — that determine whether capital actually delivers local value. Its independence from both government and industry funding mandates gives it a convening authority that a developer-led body cannot replicate.