‘The next big frontier’: Push to cover city’s office rooftops in solar panels

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Key points

• The uptake of solar panels in commercial buildings lags residential with panels installed on only around 8 per cent of buildings. 
• Challenges include buildings being owned mainly by landlords rather than occupants, overshadowing and difficulties with regulations. 
• The City of Melbourne’s target is for the city to be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy by 2050. 

A push is underway to turn Melbourne’s unused office rooftops into solar farms, but regulations, billing systems and suitable spaces are still a challenge.

Although solar energy is taking off in homes – about 33 per cent of Australian households have solar – only 8 per cent of commercial businesses in Australia have taken up the energy source, despite its lower cost than traditional power.

Richard Vargas, chief executive of United Solar Group on the rooftop of 9 Flinders Lane where the business plans to install solar panels. Credit: Joe Armao

United Solar Group, an Australian renewable energy developer, will start installing solar panels on Melbourne’s empty CBD rooftops this month and plans to expand across the equivalent of 300 hectares of empty commercial rooftops across the country.

The idea is to fit the unused rooftops with solar panels at no cost to the business landlords or tenants then bypass traditional energy retailers to sell the energy directly to the building occupants while paying a small annual income to landlords.

“There’s no need to dedicate precious green space or farmland to building solar farms when we’ve got so many commercial rooftops sitting there empty,” Richard Vargas, the group’s CEO, said.

“Seventy-five per cent of businesses don’t own the building that they actually trade from. So, there you have a major problem and the landlord obviously wants something out of it.”

It is just one of several companies trying to kickstart the uptake of solar by commercial buildings, which account for 66 per cent of all emissions across inner Melbourne.

New office projects are increasingly including solar panels in the facade and rooftops from the get-go, such as the 550 Spencer Street building, which will harvest solar energy from its facade, and the 435 Bourke Street tower, whose solar panels will generate 20 per cent of the building’s base power.

But current office rooftops are “very much underutilised”, Peter Newman, professor of sustainability at Curtin University, said.

“Households have done it, businesses haven’t,” he said. “It’s the next big frontier and it’s a business opportunity. It’s certainly the cheapest form of power and it will enable large-scale systems of solar energy, not just individual houses.”

Newman said that with rising electricity and gas costs, solar and wind are now the cheapest form of energy the world has ever known and they are getting cheaper every year.

“It’s really nice to have climate change stuff where you can save and it’s actually a better deal than the fossil fuel alternative,” he said.

Roof top solar panels on the CGU building in the CBD. Credit: Joe Armao

The City of Melbourne’s target is for the city to be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy by 2050 but the council’s climate change mitigation strategy notes barriers to commercial installation of solar panels in a trial program.

“It was challenging to find suitable commercial sites for installation due to overshadowing from surrounding buildings, and regulations that made connection to the electricity grid and distribution to neighbouring properties difficult,” the strategy notes.

Alan Pears, senior industry fellow at RMIT, said installing solar panels on city rooftops isn’t as simple as it seems.

“A key challenge is that high-rise buildings don’t have much roof space to install a lot of PV [solar photovoltaics] and there is competition for heating and cooling equipment and other uses,” he said.

He said a solution to this lack of suitable roof space is building integrated PV, which can be fitted to walls, as well as “solar windows”, the technology for which is just starting to emerge.

“The billing systems and metering systems in commercial buildings are really quite tricky and how easily they can do it will depend on those systems,” Pears said. “There are lots of possibilities; the real question is how do you make it financially stack up?”

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