NSW: Sustainability Infrastructure Survey

This article is about NSW sustainability infrastructure surveys.

Apartment residents face unique challenges in retrofitting their buildings with sustainability infrastructure. This is reflected in the proportion of NSW residences with a solar PV connection – 18% of houses in NSW have solar PV installed on their rooftops, while only 0.5% of strata schemes have connected solar PV systems.

To date, most NSW government residential sustainability programs and resources have focused on addressing sustainability barriers for houses, but not apartment buildings. In March 2019, the NSW Government announced a series of initiatives to boost renewable energy and reduce power bills in apartments, including to:

• Cut red tape for strata residents looking to install solar panels, batteries and electric vehicle charging stations to ensure tenants and owner occupiers in apartments can also benefit from clean energy,
• Review any regulatory barriers to apartments becoming more sustainable, and
• Make it easier for people in apartments to install solar panels, batteries, and other sustainability infrastructure through regulatory change.

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To facilitate the Government’s commitment, the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (the Department) is seeking to better understand the barriers faced by owners, tenants and owners corporations in existing apartment buildings to install sustainability infrastructure and benefit from investments in sustainability infrastructure. For the purposes of this project, sustainability infrastructure is defined as:

• digital electricity meters
• solar panels
• batteries
• energy efficient hot water heaters
• electric vehicle charging stations
• other emerging innovations such as demand response services (for example Virtual power plant (VPP) platforms); and energy management services (for example Solar Analytics or Watt Watchers).

The Department is seeking to investigate the end-to-end customer journey for:

• owners of individual apartments
• tenants of individual apartments, including vulnerable customers, and
• owners corporations, for common areas and shared services of apartment buildings

This will involve a comprehensive mapping exercise to help identify customer pain points, regulatory and non-regulatory barriers, process improvements, and potential solutions in enabling uptake of such infrastructure in apartment buildings. It will also help identify where barriers are shared between infrastructure types and how NSW legislation and other government actions (for example government programs) can be streamlined to link the respective customer journeys to facilitate uptake.

Have your say on barriers to installing sustainability infrastructure for apartments, townhouses and villas in NSW

We invite you to participate in an online survey to share your views and experiences about installing sustainability infrastructure in your building.

The survey takes 10-15 minutes and will assist the NSW Government to better understand the best ways to remove barriers for owners, tenants and owners corporations wanting to install sustainability infrastructure.

Please complete the survey by 11.59 pm, Sunday 9 August. Find out more on this flyer.

By completing the survey, you will be entered into a prize draw for an iPad Air 64GB valued at $779, to be held on the 17th August 2020.

Take the survey now.

This post appears in Strata News #381.

Have a question about sustainability infrastructure surveys or something to add to the article? Leave a comment below.

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Read next:

• NSW: Power2U – Discounts on Solar Systems and LED Upgrades
• NSW: Q&A Solar for Apartments – Power to the (Strata) People

Visit Apartment Living Sustainability OR NSW Strata Legislation pages.

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