Renters and apartment dwellers could be allowed to plug solar panels straight into a wall socket under a report the Ministry for Regulation released on Thursday, which recommends the Government legalise plug-in solar and strip months out of the approval process for rooftop systems.
Plug-in solar, sold in Europe as balcony solar, is a panel or two with a small inverter built in. It is hung on a balcony rail, a fence or a sunny wall and plugged into an ordinary socket, with no electrician required. 1News reported that a typical unit covers roughly 7 to 15 percent of an average New Zealand household’s daily electricity use. The kits are not legal here because the inverters they rely on are banned over concerns about electric shock and house fires. The ministry found other countries manage the same risk with product certification, output limits and other safety features, and that there was no good reason to keep the ban.
Regulation Minister David Seymour, who commissioned the review, was blunt about the comparison. “If they’re good enough for Germany and the UK, they’re good enough for us,” he told RNZ. The appeal for tenants is obvious. A plug-in kit is portable, so it moves house when they do, which rooftop panels cannot.
The bigger money sits in the other 14 recommendations, which deal with the paperwork behind a normal rooftop installation. The review found a small solar system can need up to six separate sign-offs and five site visits from four different organisations before anyone flicks the switch. If the full package is adopted, the ministry estimates approval for a household system would fall from about $640 and three months to about $200 and six days. For small and medium commercial systems, the estimate drops from up to $11,000 and six months to about $1,300 and one month.
Getting there means changing who signs off the work. The review concluded that sending an electrical inspector to every single installation was too expensive and too time consuming when an accredited installer could do the same job, and recommends exempting accredited installers from an in person inspection for systems up to 100 kilowatts. That change alone is estimated to save as much as 45 days and $600. Lines companies would also face deadlines, with standard residential connection requests cut from 10 working days to one, and medium sized installations from more than 30 days to five.
Another recommendation would exempt certain installations from needing resource consent, which the ministry says could save a further 30 days and somewhere between $3,000 and $10,000 on larger jobs. Across the whole package, the ministry puts the net benefit at between $28 million and $50 million over 10 years, from lower compliance costs, shorter delays and the arrival of plug-in solar. All 15 recommendations are expected to take about 18 months to work through if they are accepted, and Cabinet still has to make the final call on each one.
Energy Minister Simeon Brown welcomed the report, saying the proposals would make solar uptake cheaper and faster. Seymour ordered the review in May at a Cromwell cherry orchard that runs on its own solar and battery system, saying at the time that “one way or another, we’re going to have the simplest rules for doing solar in the world”. He also made clear then where the coalition’s preference lies, telling reporters that “we can subsidise things in the meantime, but that comes at the expense of taxpayers”. The Government’s May figures had solar on only about 3 to 4 percent of New Zealand homes, against more than 30 percent in parts of Australia, where approval for a low risk installation can be done inside 24 hours.
The solar industry has been waiting a long time for this. Rewiring Aotearoa policy director Dave Karl told RNZ that “solar’s day has come in New Zealand”, and said the changes would open up the option to the large majority of households currently shut out of it by cost and delay. Consumer NZ’s Paul Fuge put the household case in cents, telling RNZ that power from your own panels works out around 15 cents a kilowatt hour against 35 to 40 cents from the grid, while warning that the savings only stack up properly if households get a fair rate for the power they sell back.
The obvious constraint is people. Installers say demand has already jumped this year without any new incentive, and the country is short roughly 6,000 electricians while needing between 2,200 and 2,500 new ones a year to keep up. Future Energy co-founder Heath Coleman told RNZ that “we have to train people up constantly and that takes time and obviously a lot of cost”. The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority is consulting on an industry led accreditation programme for solar installers, which would also supply the accredited workforce the inspection exemption depends on.
Solar has become one of the few areas of energy policy where the parties are arguing about method rather than direction. Labour’s $160 million SolarSaver package, launched in early July, leans on subsidies and low interest loans, including help for renters. The coalition’s answer is to take the cost out of the rules instead. Both are chasing the same thing, which is more panels on more roofs, and New Zealand passed one gigawatt of local solar earlier this month without much help from either. With the general election set for 7 November, voters will get to pick which route they prefer. If you want to see where the parties line up on energy and the cost of living, our voting tool compares their positions side by side.
For anyone renting a flat with a sunny balcony, the practical question is when a plug-in kit stops being illegal. On the ministry’s own timetable, that is a decision for Cabinet, and the rest of the package will take the better part of two years to land.
Would you put a plug-in solar panel on your balcony if the rules allowed it, or do you think the money is better spent on the grid? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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