Australia's rooftop solar boom left apartment residents behind. Here's how to fix it

Most Australians now understand the basic promise of rooftop solar: lower power bills, cleaner electricity and, for some households, the option to charge an electric vehicle at home for far less than the cost of petrol.

But that promise was built around a particular kind of housing - the detached house with a privately controlled roof, a private meter board and a driveway or garage where the owner can install whatever equipment they need.

If you live in an apartment, unit or townhouse, the story is often very different.

That's becoming a national problem.

Rebates alone aren't enough

Apartments made up 16% of Australian dwellings in the 2021 Census, and rooftop solar supplied 14.2% of Australia's electricity in the second half of 2025, according to the latest Clean Energy Council report.

Yet apartment-specific solar programs are only now starting to appear. In New South Wales, the government says fewer than 2% of apartment buildings currently have solar.

Victoria and NSW have both started to respond. Victoria's current Solar for Apartments round offers rebates of up to A$2,800 per apartment.

NSW's Solar for Apartment Residents program offers grants of up to A$150,000 for eligible shared systems.

That is overdue progress. It suggests apartment residents are finally being treated as part of the mainstream energy transition, not an afterthought.

But rebates alone will not solve the problem.

The barrier is the building, not the panels

Australian research on apartment solar and strata solar and battery projects shows the main barriers are usually not the panels themselves.

They are the complications that come with shared buildings, including:

• roof access
• strata approvals
• common-property rules
• metering arrangements
• switchboard upgrades
• network constraints and
• how benefits are shared across residents.

Newer research on power-sharing between tenants points in the same direction.

In a detached house, one household can make one decision. In a multi-owner building, the same decision can require committee approval, engineering advice, retailer coordination and agreement on who pays and who benefits.

Smart meters (which can send data on electricity use to your retailer, so you don't need manual checks) will help, and governments are right to speed up their rollout. National rules now aim to deliver smart meters across the National Electricity Market by 2030.

But a smart meter on its own does not solve all the problems.

EV charging raises the stakes

This is no longer only about electricity bills. It's also about transport.

Federal guidance says most EV charging happens at home.

NSW says an estimated 80-90% of EV owners will charge where they live, including in apartment buildings.

That matters because home charging is usually the cheapest and most convenient way to run an EV, especially when households can use off-peak power or rooftop solar.

For people in detached houses, the long-term pathway is fairly clear: solar, a home charger and perhaps a household battery.

For people in apartments with no EV-ready infrastructure, that pathway may not exist at all.

Governments are starting to notice. NSW has funded EV-ready retrofits for residential strata buildings, and Queensland has issued guidance for bodies corporate dealing with EV charging.

But if apartment buildings cannot support electrified living, a growing share of Australians will miss out.

Carrot, stick or both?

The answer is both - but applied differently.

For existing apartment stock, governments need carrots. That means:

• co-funding for common-property electrical upgrades
• support for feasibility studies
• simpler approvals and
• trusted one-stop advice for owners corporations, body corporates and strata committees.

In many buildings, the real upfront cost is not the solar panel. It is the enabling infrastructure around it.

For new apartment developments, governments also need a stick. It makes little sense to keep approving buildings that are not solar-ready, EV-ready or set up for modern metering and shared energy services. Retrofitting later is usually slower, more expensive and more contentious.

And whatever model is used, consumer protection matters.

If apartment residents are asked to rely more on shared systems, they also need clearer rights, fairer disclosure and real recourse when something goes wrong.

An equity issue

Australia should not let rooftop solar, batteries and home EV charging become advantages available mainly to people who own detached houses.

This is partly a climate issue and partly an engineering issue. But it is also a cost-of-living issue and, increasingly, a housing equity issue.

NSW's apartment solar program explicitly says renters should be able to benefit, not just owner-occupiers.

The Social Housing Energy Performance Initiative in NSW and Victoria's Energy Efficiency in Social Housing Program show governments are also starting to treat energy access as a fairness question, not just a technology question.

The next phase of Australia's energy transition is not about proving rooftop solar works. We already know it does.

It is about deciding whether people in shared buildings can participate on fair terms.

If governments get this right, apartment buildings can become more than passive consumers of electricity. They can host shared solar, smarter demand management, batteries and EV charging.

If governments get it wrong, many Australians will keep watching the energy transition from the sidelines.

TheConversation.com

Author:

1. Saman Gorji - Associate Professor, Renewable Energy and Electrical Engineering, Deakin University
2. Alireza Ganjovi - Researcher, Energy Systems and Applied Physics, Deakin University

https://theconversation.com/australias-rooftop-solar-boom-left-apartment-residents-behind-heres-how-to-fix-it-279082