‘We’ve been left out’: The home owners locked out of cheap energy

When Graham Palmer moved into his Ringwood apartment in 2016, the north-facing unit would “cook in summertime”.

The 79-year-old retiree, who has a rare neurological disorder called orthostatic tremor that makes it impossible to stand and walk without support, asked his property manager if he could get an air-conditioner to stave off the heat.

“She came back to me two minutes later and said, ‘Look, sorry, the owners just said flat no,’” Palmer says.

While the landlord eventually agreed after he offered to put $650 towards a built-in unit, the costs have started to mount, and Palmer is keen to install solar panels to help keep his electricity bills down.

But he cannot make these decisions without the agreement of the owners’ corporation – an issue raised by many other apartment dwellers.

“It would cost something like $20,000 to put enough solar on the roof to supply all four [units in our block] and have battery-backed storage,” he says. “I can’t do it because I don’t own the flat. My landlord has no incentive to do it whatsoever.”

A new submission from advocacy group Environment Victoria to the recently closed Victorian parliamentary inquiry into renewable and affordable energy for apartments found that apartment occupiers are keen to electrify their homes, but face many obstacles, most of which they say are governance related – not technical.

This comes as Australians are looking for ways to reduce their costs and reliance on international sources of energy amid conflict in the Middle East.

Environment Victoria’s senior climate and energy adviser Kat Lucas-Healey says the group got a huge response when they asked apartment residents about what was preventing them from accessing renewable and affordable energy.

“People living in apartments are locked out of ways to reduce their energy bills,” she says. “They really want rooftop solar, efficient electric appliances, and they want to be able to do things to make the apartment more comfortable, like put in external shading or improve the windows.

“But what’s we’ve heard is that working with owners’ corporations was really difficult … in many cases the landlords just say no.”

The 2021 census found about 12.1 per cent of Victorians lived in flats or apartments, and since then, housing affordability has worsened.

Georgia Marett, 32, owns an apartment in Yarraville, where she is head of the owners’ committee. She has been trying to get her building to agree to put in solar panels for years.

“It’s really, really challenging because, first of all, the cost is really expensive for a building of my size, [which has] 39 apartments – like $80,000,” Marett says.

“Solar Victoria does not give rebates to any apartment buildings on an embedded network, which we are through no fault of our own … It’s very opaque, but so we’re just locked out of that.”

An embedded network is a private electricity system in a multi-tenanted building or community, where a private company buys electricity in bulk and then resells it to residents, instead of each household having its own electricity retailer. In Victoria, there are about 190,000 customers living in apartments, retirement villages and caravan parks on an embedded network.

The Victorian government largely banned embedded networks in new apartment buildings from January 2023 and promised to reform existing networks following a review that found Victorians were paying more.

The state government offers rebates of up to $2800 per household for residents living in eligible apartments, units and townhouses under the control of an owners’ corporation.

When asked why existing apartments on embedded networks were exempt from rebates, a spokesman for the Victorian government said it was exploring more ways to support residents in apartments and embedded networks through new technologies and regulatory reforms.

He said key barriers to apartment solar included shared roofs, complex approvals/ownership arrangements, technical solutions and decisions about sharing energy across units.

Marett says that getting every owner to agree to other measures such as getting off gas has also proved difficult.

“So you would need every single apartment to agree to get an induction stove, which is … in a 39-apartment building where a lot of the people own it as an investment, impossible.”

Liam Wallis, founder of sustainable energy property development company Hip V. Hype, says there are no technical issues when it comes to electrifying apartments.

“The technology exists now to do this work cost effectively – what we’re finding is that it’s a governance issue within the owners’ corporation legislation,” he says. “Buildings with a greater proportion of owner occupiers are probably more likely to support infrastructure upgrades because they directly receive the benefit.”

According to the Victorian Owners Corporation Act, major projects typically require a special resolution (75 per cent approval), a threshold often considered too high for sustainability initiatives.

Lucas-Healey would like to see the state government reform the act to lower those decision-making thresholds. She points to the government’s 2025 review of the Owners Corporations Act 2006, which had an expert panel deliver its report in December, which the government has not yet released.

A Victorian government spokesman said the government was considering the final report but did not offer a release time.

For Marett, not having access to a detached roof means not having control over something taken for granted by detached dwelling owners.

“Roofs are a sort of value now; houses can use them to get electricity for free after they put a costing upfront, but we can’t do that in an apartment,” she says. “We’ve been left out of the equation.”

“It does worry me when there are things going on in the world that you can’t control, [and] it would be good to have that modicum of control over your home environment, which people who live in houses can get.”