WITH Wellington Shire to be home to upcoming renewable projects, including offshore wind, it’s important to foresee what issues may arise from bringing hundreds or thousands of workers into the area without sufficient housing.
A group of high school students in Gippsland have taken part in a program which aims to solve problems like this.
Trafalgar High School students Alicia, Abby, Edith and Victoria last month graduated from a mentoring program that aims to teach problem solving. Their focus was how to address housing shortages during construction of renewable energy projects in Gippsland.
Flotation Energy, developer of the Seadragon project, took part in the mentoring project with the New Energy Technology (NET) Program, delivered by the Baw Baw Local Learning and Employment Network (LLEN).
Erin Lord, the Stakeholder Engagement Lead for the Seadragon Offshore Wind project, joined the program as a mentor in March 2023 and worked directly with the four Trafalgar High School students to solve the problem of housing for construction workers in Gippsland.
Twenty-four students took part in total, which include three other schools from Baw Baw Shire and Latrobe City.
Mentors would sit with the students during classroom-style learning, but with industry present to explain how it could apply to a real-life workplace.
“We talked about why I use time management … or how I’ve proved a concept could work so that they could do classroom style learning,” Ms Lord said.
“And also having industry sitting there explaining how that applies in a real life workplace.”
With this new workforce coming in, the students, as well as the renewable energy companies setting up in Gippsland, will need to figure out how to bring workers and their families in without reducing housing opportunities from others in these towns, and without causing rents to go up. One way the students believe they could do it differently is with modular housing.
“The project and the project problem they decided they wanted to solve … was the housing crisis for the construction workforce,” Ms Lord said.
“So let’s say we ended up with Barry Beach being a construction port, how would we house 500, or 1000 workers going out onto the vessel every day or every week?
“We went off to Cape Patterson, and we did a tour of the passive solar design housing down there.”
The students decided to build a model of modularised housing that allows more rooms or features to be added according to the construction workers housing needs. They also want the modules to be able to be transportable so that they can be used at the next project site or repurposed for social housing.
The group also had a focus on creating community spaces within the development for wellbeing and cohesion such as community gardens, barbecue areas and playgrounds.
In the end, the students created the model of the home, which was eventually 3D printed, and they also produced a video that explained to the community why this was important.
On November 13, Alicia, Abby, Edith and Victoria graduated from the NET program, and there were presentations of the innovative designs developed in the program for real-world application.
The NET program provides an opportunity for students to work with and be mentored by professionals in the renewable energy space to design, research and develop an innovation with a real-world application.
This program, which ran this year from March to November, met in person with the Trafalgar students over nine days, was designed to focus on these emerging jobs of the future, enabling young people from Years 9 and 10 to learn more about energy and technologies.
