There is significant opportunity for Australia’s property sector to transform from a passive participant in the energy market to an active electricity producer and energy market participant, according to the latest report from The Property Council and CEFC.

Distributed Energy in the Property Sector: Unlocking the Potential identifies the barriers to distributed energy in property and proposes collaborative solutions to address them, outlining:

• The opportunity in terms of the potential size of rooftop PV generation capacity in Australia’s property sector
• The regulatory, policy and market related barriers to realising this potential
• The actions the property sector, regulators and policymakers can take to address those barriers

The report proposes that the property sector is ideally placed to play a significant role in modernising Australia’s traditional, centralised electricity system to a world class two-way energy system.

Scaling up of rooftop solar PV systems across the property sector could significantly increase the amount of clean energy being fed into the grid, thus helping Australia transition to a low carbon future.

These distributed energy generation and storage technologies could alleviate the network’s operation and maintenance costs, local congestion problems and improve its reliability. Increased adoption of such technologies would enable the property sector to bring competition to the electricity market, making energy more affordable for tenants.

In considering the barriers to distributed energy in the property sector, the report underscores the need for energy market authorities, electricity networks and the property industry to improve information sharing, align planning processes and work on collaborative solutions.

More information here