I rented most of my adult life. I left home at 18, bought my first home at 32, struggled with a mortgage for three years, then sold it to start SolarQuotes. It was another four years before I bought again — only after SolarQuotes started doing well enough.
So I know what it’s like renting, especially the frustration of watching energy bills continue to climb without being able to install solar, batteries or insulation to fight back.
Installing solar panels on rental properties could reduce tenants’ electricity bills. Industry and government have tried to do just this. Australia has seen well-meaning schemes like Victoria’s Solar Homes rental initiative, the Queensland Government’s Solar For Rentals, and startups like Matter, but they’ve all hit the same wall: landlords.
The Great Wall Of Landlords
Most Australian landlords treat their rental properties as lines on a spreadsheet. They’re focused on one thing: cutting expenses and maximising rental income. Even if installing solar clearly boosts the property’s rental yield (by increasing rent or selling solar power back to tenants), landlords rarely go for it. Many are already juggling tight cash flows and won’t spend extra upfront unless absolutely necessary.
At the same time, tenants understandably won’t spend thousands to improve a property they don’t own. So solar rarely ends up on rental rooftops, despite its typical 3-5 year payback.
But I’m here to say renters don’t need solar panels over their heads. They can use their neighbours’ excess solar.
And that’s because electricity retailers now offer special tariffs designed to help soak up the oversupply of solar energy from those neighbours. io Energy, for example, charges just 8c per kWh from 10am to 4pm in SA. OVO Energy offers free electricity from 11am to 2pm.
But these plans come with crippling peak prices in the evening (an eye-watering 75c for io Energy, 65c for OVO). This means batteries become essential, letting tenants store cheap daytime energy to ride through the extortionate evening peak period.
Batteries That Can Move House
The key to making this work is affordable, portable batteries. Currently, the installation fee for installing a home battery starts at around $1,500, and tenants understandably don’t want to pay this twice every time they move (to uninstall and then reinstall).
But imagine if every home’s switchboard had a simple, standardised battery socket. Combined with a specially designed home battery, home battery installation could be as simple as plugging in an EV.
Removing home backup requirements from this new standardised battery socket1 and mass-producing a portable but high-capacity ‘renters battery’ would keep costs down.
Tenants could then buy a battery, plug it directly into the upgraded switchboard, and easily unplug and take it with them when they move.
One problem: landlords won’t pay for the socket upgrade. Realistically, it would need to be mandatory for rentals or taxpayer-funded.
Another snag: home battery prices aren’t yet low enough to tempt most renters — but they’re dropping rapidly, with battery cells down 90% in the last decade alone. Establishing plug-and-play switchboard standards now positions us perfectly for when battery prices become irresistible.
Forget solar panels on rentals. Let’s help renters directly by giving them affordable, portable batteries and easy access to the cheap solar energy already flooding Australia’s grid. Everyone wins.
Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column from SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock, in which he shares his views on all things home electrification.
For more on home battery costs today, read this comprehensive guide, or for detail on how solar panels are actually a good investment for landlords, read this explainer.
Footnotes
- maybe replaced with a couple of emergency 10A sockets on the battery itself ↩
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Thought about battery only when getting into solar in mid – late 2023.
It would probably mean doubling up on a normal size usable (say 10kwh) battery, to something in the order of minimum 20kwh, so you can be sure of covering current and potential peak usage.
That’s probably over normal solar / single battery cost right now, but no need to worry about solar panel degradation, cleaning, potential breakages, maintenance checks, etc.
I’ve looked at ESS-Fox batteries recently, they look good, floor stackable system, or wall mount plug n extend, all batteries with built in backup.
About they are double Tesla discharge rate too.
I take it you can have blackout protection with a battery only, so safeguarding some essential circuits would be a bonus for blackouts / brownouts.
Interesting concept to go battery (or bi-directional EV), and with things rapid changes seeming to be ongoing, one needs to think outside the box.
This applies especially for renters, but regular home owners can certainly benefit.
The only thing I can think of that might mean solar and battery is better, is power suppliers / retailers could drop / change terms etc for special solar soak offers at any time, and leave you in a bind.
With solar powering a battery, you are more or less a bit more in control of your needs.
Some of us are in for a triple hit soon with power costs . . .
SA, some NSW, SE Qld set for probable increases in tariffs / supply charges (again ?) from July 1st.
Solar soak penalty (sun tax) starting in SA, Vic, Qld (Tas ?) also from July 1st, already in NSW from last July 1st.
FITs reducing fast, probably be negative with sun tax soon.
Another battery benefit, most software will allow you to stop export to grid if you do get into negative fit.
As said, rules changing fast, goal posts are being moved regularly.
Going off-grid nearly 1.5 yrs ago, I installed 46 kWh of LiFePO₄, in three 15.5 kWh banks of 16 cells – for $18k total, including 3 BMSs to manage them. That served 2 households over xmas, including charging 3 EVs from 27 kW of panels. (It’ll be harder to repeat next week, as there’s 3-4 days of heavy overcast each week now. With rain, it took the whole day to bring SoC back up to 100% today – never before seen.)
So 30 kWh would cost only $12k, and likely be enough with 25+ kW of panels.
(27 kW yielded 1.3 – 1.6 kW today, in opaque overcast with 29 mm of rain)
To skip the DIY barrier, a stack of four 5 kWh rack mountable managed LiFePO₄ can be had for around $2700 each, with Aussie warranty, around $11k for 20 kWh. (My system manages SoC with nothing more than a current shunt in the battery -ve lead, so battery comms not needed. But battery WiFi and a phone app are worth having.)
My off-grid uptime is not 99.998%, but 100% so far. And with redundant arrays, redundant battery inverters, and redundant PV inverters, there’s no downtime for swapping one out a week or two after failure, as all can be isolated on both sides for that.
The grid is still the cheapest battery, but for how long?
If V2G could motivate millions of city folk to swap one family ICE commuter for a BEV, on the economic benefit of electricity tariff dodging with vehicle batteries, then the drop in fossil fuel pollution would be staggering. Zero vehicle fuel costs (If the BEV is solar charged) doesn’t seem to do it, though.
I agree, though I can see a rising issue.
The Gas suppliers are facing imminent crisis where they end up with an expensive distribution asset and no customers to pay for it, In their case there literally wont be any customers because the ones they had have completely abandoned them with no ongoing relationship.
In the electricity world however the opposite is occurring. Smart people are curtailing what they buy in terms of units of energy but are remaining connected to the grid because no matter how good your local solar and battery are, they wont have teh amount of 9’s in the uptime percentage that the grid has. The electricity retailer has 3 approaches they can use. They have a daily charge that can be varied upward so that in the end they can still get their $100 a month of required income per customer through a connection fee, or in the commercial world he can use demand pricing set up to penalise the customer for that 10 minutes of overcast rainy weather that established the highest point of demand in the month that can then be applied to the whole rest of the month.
Either way they can still get sufficient funds from their customers so that the grid connection has a real and meaningful cost. When sufficient Battery’s are bought and implemented then the daily rate will climb from $1.50 to $4 a day and the only way to truly avoid it will be to ignore the greater good for mankind by having a grid that everyone connects to and going it alone. To go it alone you need renewable forms of generation and as you identified in the article rentals don’t generally have that.
As always early adopters will pay nearly the most for their Battery but will avoid a bunch of costs of the usage of the grid until it catches up. Late adopters will pay and then be almost immediately afflicted with increased daily rates…. Its a conundrum. We need V2H or V2G to make do. Rentals, small homes and apartments are doomed for now due size of generation potential.
Hi Andy,
You make a lot of good points. I have wondered if electricity may move to a “thin pipe” model where your daily charge is lower on a property that only has a 20amp supply for instance.
There’s arguments that the grid is a great public good, like reticulated water & sewer that you have to pay for whether you’re connected or whether it just runs down your street.
Grid defectors perhaps need compulsion to pay, lest we end up with suburbs full of diesel generation wailing at 2am on a winters night.
I think a considerable saving would be made on grid electricity if we renationalised & vertically integrated the generation, distribution & retail.
Lowering the reliability standards might sound batty, but with 99.998% the current benchmark, a lot of money could be saved trimming the .008 off the end… and customers with batteries aren’t going to notice.
Gas has proven a God send in Queensland after e days no power.
So called “balcony power systems” as quite common in Europe which offer renters the ability to own their own solar and/or battery that they can take with them when they move. However, currently our Australian standards don’t allow plugin generation devices, only those connected by fixed wiring to a dedicated circuit. Europe has solved the safety issue by mandating pluggable power systems are limited to 600VA (~800W) of injected power which is well below the maximum power rating of any standard 10A socket outlet. The devices must also island within 200ms so no chance of exposed live pins on the unit’s male plug. Given that approximately 30% of Australians rent… we need to update our standards to permit this option. Some electricity retailers, like Amber, even have dynamic tariffs that smart balcony systems like Anker’s Solarbank can take advantage of.
Yes i think there was an article on here about those systems a few months back.
I had forgotten about them. certainly a place to start!
Or combine the standardized “plug and play” switchboard addition so that it can cater for standalone batteries as well as EVs, and possibly get a govt installation rebate which either the renter or the landlord can access. That way, it encourages the uptake of both EVs and home batteries (even if the home batteries are portable) and would hopefully drive standardization in connection technology across EVs and batteries.
Some of the new power stations are getting close to be of sufficient capacity to do that.
Getting them integrated into a home could be the the way forward.
Seems like such a socket and plug-in battery could also help home-owners bridge the gap from grid only to grid + battery.
Just because someone owns their own home doesn’t mean they can necessarily afford an efficient home solar pv & battery system for themselves.
For Landlords to supply such resources to their renters, it could just be as ‘simple’ as making landlords tax breaks dependent on some Aussie egalitarianism by providing that type of socket, as a minimum.
Want tax breaks from property investments & rentals, be Australian and show some care for the occupants, or be thrown off the tax-break merry-go-round.
Australia continues to fund the rich more than it does the poorer amongst us; the Coalition continues to ensure that this is the Australia THEY love, only for the rich. The coalition loves to take its play from the Conservative US playbook, just as we see now with dutton almost licking trump’s rear end in anticipation of his palmer backed win.
Interesting thought experiment Finn, I have been a renter for a few years back in the late seventies way before solar PV on roofs was a thing and I have been a landlord with a few properties over the years. We do still own a house in Tanunda SA which we rented for a few years but now run it as a short term rental (STR aka Airbnb). We did put 8kW of panels on it with a Fronius inverter about 5 years ago after we started the STR thing. My experience with tenants has been mixed some excellent and the bad ones absolutely devious and very difficult and expensive to manage and deal with so much so I will never do normal long term rentals ever again just not worth the headache, grief and expense. So I definitely wouldn’t trust a tenant with a battery on my property and there would be considerable insurance issues and risk that would make the arrangement you suggest unworkable
Agree with ´not worth the risk´. Bad enough tenants having Li-ion goods & toys to charge, without needing to worry about an extra battery that I would have no control over.
Much better to assist Landlords to Do-the-right-thing. Tax deductions & incentives better.
Couldn’t one argue this is basically what an EV is, a battery on wheels?
Or is the problem that the preferred kind of EV is one with low range, a small battery, and a low (for EVs) price?
The ideal renter EV would be one with a yuge battery and can be parked in the garage from 11am to 2pm no?
With respect Finn why don’t you put your skills, training etc to use and build use what we need – that would be useful and a nice earn for you to boot!
I’ve built a small battery box for camping that I’ve often thought could be modified to work quite well in such situations.
It wouldn’t work for hardwired appliances such as A/C & HWS (which, unfortunately, would be the best uses for such a device), but it would require zero modifications to the dwelling’s wiring.
Essentially it would be a wifi-controlled battery charger and inverter with an Anderson plug for easy hookup to an external battery (sized appropriately for the load).
Buy several of these and distribute then around the house to run the fridge and microwave in the kitchen, the TV etc in the lounge, the office etc.
Charge the batteries when power is cheap, run the devices off the battery when power is expensive.
Oh, and “borrow” one when you go camping!
Yes, given the time of use charging capabilities availabilities with smart meters and the non existent feed in tariffs available now – i would reckon “just a battery” would be a far better investment than “just solar”.
It would probably need it mandated that tenants are allowed to have the switchboard modified to allow such a connection.
The battery would only need to get you through the evening peak, so it doesnt have to be all that large.
Sizing: in our 7 person household with 2 of Induction cooktops, my battery is 12Kw. We flatten it before 8pm usually. Our usage is ~25Kw/day, most during evening peak. That is a weighty battery…Not really portable.
I feel better for Landlords to be subsidised for gearing up for V2G once available & in general use. Once we have external control of the Chargers (OCPP, probably controlled by the energy retailer), the control can be seamless for the renter (they only need to enter their departure time, then let the controller do the rest.
I value your opinion Finn – but simple evaluation of a problem without an actual useable product that you could build reminds me of Doctors that leave medicine to do Tic-toc ……….because it pays more.
You have articulated the problem, the math supports it’s success, you have the skillset; and I suspect know others that could come in on a joint venture. This idea is something that you would be able to be market around the world.
Just how long will it be before CHINA realizes the size of the market and usurps your idea?
“Build it and they will come”
“Build it and they will buy it”
Do yourself and Australia proud and build a portable battery which renters and other can use!
Do you really have to build a better battery – can’t you build a universal battery adaptor to do what you have suggested?
Finn,
It’s this kind of lateral “outside the box” thinking that we need a lot more of.
Your proposal has a significant supplementary benefit, if it will island with the main breaker thrown; still able to heat baby formula in a grid outage, whether downed trees, annual insane Queensland floods, or flattened HV pylons.
But I figure that the “standardised battery socket” requires that the landlord installs a hybrid inverter to provide the battery interface … except that you have a Tesla Powerwall, I seem to recall, so here “battery” is likely an “AC coupled battery”, i.e. battery + inverter/charger. Ah, yes, footnote 1 confirms.
Now that I’m on the same page, a horrible hack comes to mind. Park one of those wheeled “battery generators” beside a kitchen bench, or in extremis a table, and plug in a $50 Aldi induction cooktop, the PC & internet modem, then the 75c tariff can be avoided for a few hours, on 8c energy. OK, the PC & internet modem could stay on the grid, to avoid excessive trip hazards, as their consumption is so low.
For greater endurance, a second “battery generator” in the laundry could be used in situ or physically swapped with the kitchen unit, aided by the wheels.
That’s a bit much for an evening’s tariff dodging, but anything in a storm, I figure.
And with their wheels, they’d quickly load into the removals van – just hire one with a lifting tailgate. (It’s just over a year since I used one – very nifty when you’re 70, no longer quite so suited to muscling larger items.)
Alternatively, a pair of rackable 5 kWh LiFePO₄ batteries @ $2700 each, plus a Victron Multiplus 5000, is cheaper than a $15,000 Powerwall, even after made up into a imitation of a commercial “battery generator”. The “shore power” input on the Multiplus would allow the grid input to remain always connected, even switching in for consumption at a low SoC. Add two more batteries, for 20 kWh, and you’re cooking – without inhibition. Portably.
Take it camping?
As a former landlord, I would only consider it if I wasn’t paying. My switchboard is on an asbestos backing board and I’m surprised electricians haven’t yet refused to add stuff to it. The cost of upgrading to a new board is well over $1,000. It’s just not going to happen.
Nothing personal, Lee, but this is part of the problem. A landlord unwilling to spend $1 – 2k on a an investment worth hundreds of thousands at a minimum. Also, perfectly willing to jeopardise the health of the poor electricians working on the box as well.
As I said, it’s nothing personal, it’s happening all over the country. I blame sucessive gobernments who have turned a blind eye while housing has changed from being seen as a ‘home’ into a ponzi scheme.
A great idea, and could be extended to owned apartments where solar is “too hard” for Owners Corporations to get their heads around. What regulatory issues would need to be addressed to allow a battery sitting on the laundry bench??!
Here’s another good idea to ADD to yours:
Regulation to cap the margin between what a consumer pays for LOCALLY generated energy and what the prosumer is paid to export.
Here’s how it could work. All rooftop PV installations have smart meters, so that prosumers can currently be ripped on export. Therefore you can calculate to substation/locality/time-slot level what portion of the energy is locally generated. If a consumer has a smart-meter, you can calculate vice-versa what portion of their consumption is local.
The retailers want consumers to have smart-meters so they can tie them up in tricky time-of-use contracts whereby they are fooled into thinking they can save money, when usually the opposite is the case. Hoist them on their own petard, I say.
I like your idea, but I think we need to see absolutely-non-flammable batteries, like PowerCap, ArcActive, Ambri before ultra-conservative strata committees burnt by scooter batteries and believing of EV scarifying can be dragged to the table. It’s not just landlords …
Hi Darrel,
You should look up LocalVolts.
😉
Hey Anthony,
Localvolts is great in theory until you think about the realworld application. Lets say i have LV at home – and am Ausgrid Demand Tarriff – do a deal with my neighbour to sell him all his power at 10c – everyone is happy.
They put themselves onto the Ausgrid Demand tarrif – in the evening – even though i am selling them at 10c – they are effectively paying 40c per kwh because of the demand tarriff – so instead they would need to look at another tarriff that ausgrid offers – either flat (around 20c/kwh) or TOU which varies but it still up around 32c in the peak period
The whole local trading falls down then without some intervention to actually identify locally produced and consumed power and to tarrif that differently
Crai
Hi Craig,
Perhaps one or both of us has missed something but as I understand it both you and your neighbour need to use LocalVolts.
You both do a handshake deal for 10c/kWh and Ausgrid get a network fee for handling the energy. This may still make it economically challenging?
fyi, I use PV & TOU on 2 rental flats where the power is included in rent. Average use is 15Kw/day per flat, & much cheaper on TOU than flat rate. Most usage is O/P, so at a lower rate. Currently I pay about 36c/kwh peak rate. It is important to choose your supplier wisely!
love the idea~ @Finn, if you know any product is getting closer to this point would love to jump on and promote them national wide to our retailers and installers network ~!!
I’ve asked a similar question in recent years.
Sometimes it isn’t waiting for some proprietary or altruistic plug solution to occur. Experience says they are late or never.
I always look for solutions within the existing technology and hardware.
The standard 32 amp single phase plug and socket meets the needs now. Just have a short connector between grid input and the house breakers for when a battery isn’t being used.
Connectors using these standard fittings can happen cheaply now. The tenant just needs landlord approval for a straightforward and “reversible” change to the switchboard.
Size matters! I think the low hanging fruit starts at the biggest batteries (think Snowy 2.0) and the picking list ascends through large commercial/industrial batteries, then community batteries, then free standing residences, duplexes etc, with apartment building batteries being pretty much consigned to the too hard box as noted by so many of the posts on this topic; rewiring, costs, safety, insurance, red-tape etc.
More government and community action on the low hanging fruit please! Including cheaper residential batteries for all.
Extrapolating Graham’s “Bang for buck” optimised approach, seeking to maximise results, rather than exert disproportionate effort on the least responsive infrastructure cases, what about “Solar Gardens?” I seem to recall reading in Renew magazine, that there are schemes where consumers can buy a share in a small solar farm, taking dividends in the form of cheaper electricity. In buying their own discounted Green energy, renters can not only save ongoing cost, but more easily help save the planet – in a 100% zero-weight portable manner when moving out. (And no battery packs stacked in the laundry!)
And there’s no concern about spontaneous combustion, either for the tenant or landlord – not to mention, no need for specially developed renter’s battery sockets ‘n stuff.
Absolutely! And eloquently put. I’d forgotten to mention this new breed of solar community farms. My wife and I are downsizing to apartment living and on my to do list is to investigate further this perfectly portable solution. Thanks for the reminder.
Maybe Solar Quotes can (or already has) done the homework on this topic. I’ll also be asking my sister – she’s working with Saul Griffith on Electrify 2515
Interesting thoughts Finn. I am a landlord. My market is low income long termers.
I own a row of 3 well designed north facing flats with adequate eaves to exclude summer sun. Insulation in the roofs. One tenant smokes inside and runs the heater most days in winter and the air con most days in summer with the front door open to reduce the smoke inside. The second place has had the curtains and blinds shut day & night winter & summer for the last 25 years. The third understands the system and runs the place to reduce costs and benefits from the passive solar design.
The previous tenant had a fire but would not allow our electrician access to have the power reconnected. Instead he made up a copper pipe replacement for the service fuse which meant I had to have the wiring pulled from the back of the meter board. He then tapped into the security lighting until I had that disconnected. He then started running an extension lead at night down to a neighbours carport roller door motor plug. They were none too pleased and put up a security system and a higher fence. Then after not paying rent for months and refusing to move out he took me to VCAT for an $8k damages claim with a forged electricians certificate.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the bother.
My thought is that there are some tenants out there who would love us landlords to provide stuff like you suggest. Unfortunately others actively choose not to benefit from the things already available to them.
I have one tenant who asked about solar but I was reluctant to go ahead because of the amount of shading from the neighbours, perhaps something like this would be an alternative.
Per my post elsewhere, a perfect example of apartment batteries (or solar) being the most difficult fruit to pick on top of a high tree.