Push to deliver solar to 2.5m apartment dwellers gains traction

A push to improve access to rooftop solar for Australia’s 2.5 million apartment dwellers is gaining momentum, but owners are still facing headwinds from strata and government bureaucracy.

About 35 to 40 per cent of detached homes have rooftop solar – making Australia the world leader – but for apartments it is less than 3 per cent, industry figures suggest.

Over the past two years, the NSW and Victorian governments, with federal support, have offered grants for apartment buildings to add solar panels.

Among them was Edmond Yan’s three-storey 1960s apartment building in Waverton on the lower north shore of Sydney, which installed solar panels last October. The NSW government’s Solar for Apartment Residents scheme contributed about $23,000 out of total costs of $58,000, which Yan said made the decision much easier for the owners’ corporation.

Rather than installing solar solely for communal power, the building bought Allume Energy’s SolShare product, which splits the 26-kilowatt system on the roof between the 12 apartments.

“That’s the much more appealing aspect of it for us because our common power uses hardly anything because we don’t have a lift or common hot water or anything like that,” Yan said. “We only have lighting, and that’s on at night, so actually the benefit of solar without batteries is minimal to almost none during the day.”

Yan said his electricity usage was 38 per cent lower for the six months after the installation than the same time period the previous year, which translated to a $250 saving on his bill. He has also paid to install an electric vehicle charger in his dedicated parking spot, which is connected to his apartment’s electricity supply.

Melbourne-based Allume Energy started selling SolShare in 2019, and industry sources say it has no direct competitors to date. The unit splits solar energy equitably between apartments – as few as five and as many as 60 – and SolShare 2 with support for solar batteries is launching this month.

In a sign of growing momentum for apartment solar, Allume Energy almost doubled its Australian installations in the past year. As of June 1, it had connected 6654 Australian apartments in total, with 3182 of those in the past 12 months, the company said.

The company’s co-founder and chief executive Cameron Knox said the rebates were a catalyst for significant uptake in both its home state of Victoria and NSW, its biggest Australian market.

“Victoria and NSW are forever competing in many ways, but for us, they’re competing on how many apartments are connected,” Knox said. “NSW has the highest den