22 Jun How apartment owners can join the solar power boom
Taking back the Power
While there are now more solar panels in Australia than people, many apartment-dwellers have largely been locked out of the solar revolution. This is due to the minefield of red tape and potentially uninformed strata committees. In the face of these challenges, Stucco, a small co-operative housing block in Sydney, embarked on a mission to take back the power. Hopefully, their experiences can serve as a guide to how other apartment-dwellers can more readily go solar.
From an energy perspective, Stucco was a typical apartment block. Each of its eight units had its own connection to the grid and was free to choose its own retailer, but was severely impeded from choosing to supply itself with on-site renewable energy.Things changed in late 2015 when the co-op was awarded an Innovation Grant from the City of Sydney with a view to becoming the first apartment block in Australia to be equipped with solar and batteries.
A central part of Stucco’s plan was to share the locally produced renewable energy by converting the building into an “embedded network”. Whereby the building has a single grid connection and manages the metering and billing of units internally.
Such a conversion seemed like an ideal solution for solar on apartments but turned into an ideological battle with the electricity regulator that took months and hundreds of hours of pro-bono legal support to resolve.
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