As a university student in Canberra, Eilis Fitt and her two housemates set rules to keep their electricity bill down - no heater in the living room unless everyone was home, and no turning on the washing machine or dishwasher during peak hours.
So she was delighted - and surprised - when their landlord installed solar panels about a year after she moved in. After some initial hiccups, the effect was startling: their electricity bills “went down significantly,” she said.
“It made us feel so much more comfortable about turning on the heater when it got cold,” said Fitt, 25.
“We got lucky - it’s very rare for renters to have solar. Landlords generally don’t care about how much tenants have to fork out for their electricity use,” she told Context.
Australia has the highest solar capacity installed per capita in the world, with photovoltaic panels in about one-third of households, or 3.6 million homes. That helps many cope with some of the highest electricity prices in the Asia Pacific.
But the benefits have largely eluded renters and those living in social housing, with analysts estimating that only 4 per cent of rental homes have solar power.
“There are no incentives for renters to pay for solar systems themselves, since they have limited security of tenure, let alone rights to do much to the property itself,” said Dylan McConnell, a renewable energy researcher at the University of New South Wales.
“Similarly, landlords have limited incentive to install solar, since only the renter has the relationship with the energy retailer and can therefore benefit,” said McConnell.
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The people who want solar have already got it by now. So we have to go after the renters, the low-income households, those who live far from the grid, and make it easier for them.
Jenny Paradiso, co-founder, Suntrix
But there is a growing realisation that installing solar on social housing and rentals - which make up more than 30 per cent of properties - is essential to meeting clean energy targets, McConnell said. So there are efforts to encourage landlords to make that investment, he said, with incentives such as grants, rebates and low-interest loans.
Energy hardship
Australia, with a population of some 25 million, is seeing more frequent extreme weather events such as forest fires, floods, and especially heat waves which are forecast to increase in frequency, intensity and duration due to climate change.
Generous subsidies, alongside “dramatically escalating” electricity prices, kickstarted the household PV boom from around 2010, according to McConnell, helping more than double Australia’s renewable electricity generation in the last decade.
