Re: Vote to put solar on roof

@JimmyT said:

You should also take a close look at the responsibilities for repair and maintenance of the solar panels and the roof where they are installed.  For instance, you might want the owners corp to retain responsibility for the roof but the individual owners to have responsibility for their solar panels.

Or you could have the OC install the entire array and find a way of charging owners for electricity they use.
 

With reference to the second option, there has been press coverage recently in the Sydney Morning Herald that caught my interest: https://www.domain.com.au/news/here-comes-the-sun-threestorey-apartment-block-installed-solar-panels-now-pays-half-the-energy-bills-20180427-h0z5iw/

It describes an installation at ‘Stucco’, a small 8 unit co-operative housing block in Sydney which converted the building into an “embedded network” whereby the building has a single grid connection and manages the metering and billing of units internally. The SMH article also refers to this as a ‘micro grid’. There is some better technical description at https://theconversation.com/get-in-on-the-ground-floor-how-apartments-can-join-the-solar-boom-79172

However, after following this up with the principal of SunTenants, the group responsible for this scheme, I learned that what doesn’t come out clearly in the press coverage is that the legal work required to get an exemption from the regulator and draft agreements for all of the parties participating in the scheme was horrendously expensive at $130,000. For them, as a pilot scheme this was covered by Gilbert and Tobin as pro bono work and by Sydney City Council with a special grant. And next time, one could expect it to be cheaper now that the precedent has been set.

But the clear advice from SunTenants was to keep it simple and continue down the path that we are on of separate, individual systems for our four apartments and another for the common area.