There are 13 towers in Sydney’s suburb of Wolli Creek, with 1929 apartments and more than 3500 residents. Residents of these towers are struggling to electrify.
When my husband and I downsized from our four bedroom house in Sydney’s inner west into a newly built high rise apartment in a development in Wolli Creek, we were shocked to discover we were back in the 20th century energy landscape.
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In our house, we’d had the benefits of reduced electricity bills from our rooftop solar and were planning to buy an electric car. We had read about the benefits of electrification – massively reduced energy bills over time and close to zero greenhouse emissions – and we were keen to stay on the electrification journey we had started.
We hit the first snag when we found out there was no infrastructure for charging electric vehicles (EVs) in our brand new high rise building.
So, we joined the strata committee and put through motions to investigate getting EV infrastructure installed – only to be told that there wasn’t enough electrical capacity supplied to our building to put in EV charging capacity for all the car spaces, even if the committee would agree to spend over $65,000 on an installation process.
It was a similar story with trying to get off gas for cooking and hot water heating.
All 300 units in our building have built-in gas cooktops (in Caesar stone benchtops), which, as well as burning fossil fuel, are increasingly being recognised as health hazards due to their leaking of methane and other harmful gases, even when switched off.
The simplest and most cost effective solution is to buy a portable induction cooktop and plug it in to sit on top of the gas burners – one of our neighbours is doing this, but there’s only one plate… I talked with an owner in another building in our development who had his entire kitchen remodelled to properly install a full induction cooktop.
Another challenge is replacing our gas hot water heating system. Water heating accounts for a quarter of household energy use, but the cost of replacing our building’s six unit gas water heating system with a much more efficient electric heat pump system will be a big upfront expense that we will need to convince our strata committee worth the lifetime cost savings.
We jumped at the opportunity to join a Solar Citizens pilot project to examine high rise electrification issues and formed Electrify Wolli Creek with other owners and renters in our complex. Together, we are documenting the barriers and finding the right solutions to ensure the half a million of us living in high rise apartments in Australia won’t be left behind in the transition to renewable energy and clean transport and can experience the cost of living benefits that come with it.
Our current project is to put a modest rooftop solar installation onto our building, to get less than 5 per cent of our common electricity use from renewable energy. We are also exploring how to access enough solar power for all our residents to opt into, potentially through a solar garden concept.
What my journey has made clear to me is that it’s most important to make buildings energy efficient and, therefore, cheaper to live in at the design and construction stage. With state governments like NSW planning for a massive boost in higher-density housing in our cities, they need to ensure our planning regulations future-proof new high-rise developments so owners and renters have access to cheap, clean electrical energy.
All new apartments should be built without gas connection, with rooftop solar, behind-the-meter batteries, and EV charging infrastructure (or at least the capacity to install them) to ensure owners and renters living in these vertical communities can enjoy the bill-busting benefits of renewable energy and clean transport.
To support retrofitting apartment buildings, we need the federal government’s rebate programs, like the Commonwealth Solar Banks Program, to allocate enough funds for all state and territory governments to make rebates and loans available for high rise apartment strata committees to electrify and for landlords to have access so renters also benefit.
And we desperately need more councils to put in place programs like the City of Sydney’s Smart Green Apartments that helped one Sydney high rise (the Goldsborough building) to install one of the largest residential solar systems in the southern hemisphere – a 176kW rooftop solar system with 391 panels!
We found out through joining the Electrify Wolli Creek project that while high-rise energy challenges are complex, there is hope if we give strata owners the information and support they need. We also urgently need to address the affordability of energy upgrades so that we can bring apartment living into the 21st century and contribute to our Net Zero future.