How new government grants and technology are helping residents cut electricity bills
A drive to improve access to rooftop solar for Australia’s 2.5 million apartment dwellers is gaining momentum, but property owners still face headwinds from strata and government bureaucracy.
About 35 to 40 percent of single-family homes have rooftop solar; This makes Australia a world leader; However, according to industry figures, this rate is less than 3 percent in apartments.
In the last two years, the NSW and Victorian governments have offered grants to add solar panels to apartment buildings with federal support.
These included Edmond Yan’s 1960s three-storey apartment building in Waverton on Sydney’s north shore, which had solar panels installed last October. The NSW government’s Solar Energy for Apartment Residents program provided about $23,000 of the $58,000 total cost, which Yan said made the decision much easier for the owners’ company.
Rather than just installing solar for shared power, the building purchased Allume Energy’s SolShare, which splits the rooftop 26-kilowatt system among 12 apartments.
“That’s what’s much more appealing about this for us because our shared power uses almost nothing because we don’t have an elevator, shared hot water or anything like that,” Yan said. “We only have lighting and that is on at night, so actually the benefit of battery-free solar power is little to almost non-existent during the day.”
Yan said that in the six months after installation, electricity usage was 38 percent lower than in the same period the previous year, which meant a savings of $250 on his bill. He also paid to install an electric vehicle charger in his private parking spot, which is connected to his flat’s electricity supply.
Melbourne-based Allume Energy started selling SolShare in 2019 and industry sources say it has no direct competitors so far. The unit splits solar energy evenly between at least five and up to 60 apartments, and SolShare 2, which supports solar cells, is launching this month.
In a sign of growing momentum in the apartment solar space, Allume Energy nearly doubled its installations in Australia last year. The company said it had connected a total of 6,654 Australian apartments as of June 1, 3,182 of which were in the last 12 months.
The company’s co-founder and CEO Cameron Knox said the discounts were the catalyst for a significant increase in both its home state of Victoria and its largest Australian market, NSW.
“Victoria and NSW are constantly competing in many ways, but for us they compete on how many flats are connected,” Knox said. “NSW has the highest density of apartments in Australia, and the state’s strata legislation also allows for easier adoption of sustainability measures such as solar power and batteries.”
In most states, including Victoria, an owner-owned company needs a special resolution with 75 per cent support to approve solar investment. In NSW, strata legislation allows for a “sustainability infrastructure solution” that requires only 50 per cent of the vote. The industry has called for an inquiry into residential renewable energy for the Victorian parliament to adopt the policy.
In Yan’s case, after making sure the roof could support the weight, his neighbors voted overwhelmingly in favor of the solar installation. Yan said the benefit to property owners is clear, while homeowners are convinced it will increase property values. Fortunately the building did not need any further capital works at that time.
Covering an average of 76 per cent of costs, the Victoria Solar Homes Program has funded the solar installation of 2736 flats since February 2024, with a further 754 flats planned to be built. 1115 of these occurred in the last 11 months.
A Solar Victoria spokesman added that 46 per cent of installations were for rental flats.
Since February 2025, the NSW rebate program has provided grants of up to 50 per cent of total costs, as well as additional funding support for selected suburbs. A government spokesman said it had financed 165 buildings or 3000 individual flats as of May this year.
The figures are still low compared to the overall growth of solar power, which totaled 4.1 million Australian households last month, according to figures from solar consultancy SunWiz.
The 3 per cent figure comes from a research paper prepared for the NSW government by Solar ChoiceWe’re looking at the state’s 49,000 strata plans of five or more lots. Solar Choice CEO Jeff Sykes said the national figure will be similar.
Heidi Lee Douglas, executive director of Solar Citizens, a solar consumer advocacy group, said installing solar for an apartment building requires a lot of work, and that work falls on the shoulders of residents working as volunteers.
“You need a solar champion in your ranks [scheme]Willing to go through the paperwork to apply for grants and coordinate advocacy across layers,” Douglas said. “Sometimes there are other issues they bring up in the process… One person I talked to in the community found out they needed a $70,000 upgrade to their meter box before they could actually do the work.”
A Solar Victoria spokesman said the difficulty of securing agreement within an owner company meant some installations took 12 to 18 months to complete.
The Australian Owners Enterprise Network this week won a grant from the NSW government to provide an expert resource to assist apartment owners through the process.
High-rise apartments are excluded from grant programs and also tend to have limited roof space for panels, Douglas said. He advocates creating “urban renewable energy zones” that involve developing solar power and batteries on large commercial, industrial and public buildings and then sharing them with neighboring apartment buildings within a local network.
SunWiz CEO Warwick Johnson said Australia should allow balcony solar panels used in Germany. As this imprint has previously reported, the devices, which cost about $500, hang from a balcony railing, plug into a standard electrical outlet, and can be taken with a resident when he or she moves house.
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Caitlin Fitzsimmons is the environment and climate correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously a social affairs reporter and Money editor.Connect via email.
