Victoria now has blueprint to close solar divide. Here’s where to start

For Victorians in apartments, the gap runs in two directions at once. They are falling behind the homeowners down the street, and they are falling behind apartment residents in other states.

As the world’s only provider of technology that lets apartments share a single rooftop solar system, we have a clear view of the difference. In the first year of New South Wales’s (NSW) Solar for Apartment Residents program, we saw roughly 75% more apartment solar projects approved for funding in that state than when Victoria’s apartment solar rebate began.

Our analysis puts the cost to apartment residents in Victoria at around $205 million a year, as much as $756 per apartment in missed annual savings annually, by not having solar and a battery.

This year the Victorian Parliament turned to the divide. Its inquiry into renewable and affordable energy for apartments found “distinct and complex barriers” that have stopped 271,000 apartment households from cutting their bills the way homeowners can, leading to serious inequity.

On 12 August the Legislative Assembly’s Environment and Planning Committee tabled its report, with 52 findings and 25 recommendations on how to overcome them.

The clock is now running. Under Victorian law the government has six months to say which recommendations it will adopt, and that deadline falls as the state heads into its November election. With 25 recommendations to work through, the government should tackle the ones that will do the most first.

Our work in NSW shows that it starts with strata. In Victoria, a sustainability upgrade to an apartment building currently needs the backing of at least 75% of owners. When even getting 75% of people to vote is a lot to ask, this sets a high bar that runs many a well-intentioned proposal aground. The committee took up Allume’s recommendation to lower that threshold to 50% of those voting, drawn from our experience in NSW where this already applies. That change alone, together with making sustainability a standing item on every strata’s annual general meeting agenda, should unlock a lot of pent-up demand.

On one critical recommendation the government should go further than the committee: energy-efficiency disclosures schemes. Our work in the United Kingdom (UK) leaves no doubt about their power to propel greater uptake of rooftop solar and other improvements. When landlords have to meet minimum energy-efficiency standards, and a poor rating drags down what a property will sell or rent for, the interests of owners and tenants line up behind the upgrades that help tenants save. But to have teeth, disclosure has to be mandatory, not voluntary as the report recommended.

Other recommendations deserve to move quickly too. Funding solar for social housing would open up a huge part of the apartment sector, as it has in the UK, where government-backed retrofit funds are accelerating adoption. The Solar for Apartments rebate should be extended and widened to include batteries, and the meter and switchboard upgrades that push up out-of-pocket costs, and kill good proposals, should be covered by interest-free financing.

The inquiry has done its job. The findings are thorough and they matter, but only if they reach the people they are meant to help, and soon. The gap between houses and apartments is still widening, as more freestanding homes add subsidised batteries to the rooftop solar they already have in far greater numbers. Put that alongside record-high rents, and the distance in living costs between a homeowner and someone renting an apartment grows wider by the month.

The task is urgent for another reason: Victoria is targeting 65% renewable energy by 2030 and 95% by 2035, but sat at 42.4% in 2024/25, a substantial gap to close in five years.

Both sides of Victorian politics should commit, before voters go to the polls, to writing this report’s recommendations into law. With the right mix of good technology and good policy, Victoria can do more than fix things for its own apartment residents. It can set an example for the rest of Australia, and other countries who will inevitably face the same challenge, to follow.

Author: Cameron Knox, CEO and co-founder, Allume Energy