Plug-in solar should be made legal for renters and apartment dwellers, government review finds

A government review released on Thursday has recommended New Zealand legalise plug-in solar, the small panels that run into an ordinary wall socket, and strip out layers of paperwork that can add three months and hundreds of dollars to getting a household solar system switched on.

The Ministry for Regulation’s sector review of residential and small to medium scale solar makes 15 recommendations, and the ministry expects all of them could be in place within 18 months. Eight would need changes to the Electricity Industry Participation Code. Others, including legalising plug-in solar, could be done through secondary legislation without a new Act of Parliament.

Plug-in solar is common in Europe, where it is often sold as balcony solar. A unit is usually one or two panels with a small inverter built in, mounted on a balcony, a fence, a terrace or a patch of garden, and plugged into a normal socket. There is no roof work and no rewiring. Rewiring Aotearoa, the electrification group that pushed for the review, says a typical unit can offset somewhere between 7 and 15 percent of an average New Zealand household’s daily power use. It does not replace a grid connection, it just shaves the daytime load.

The reason nobody here can buy one is a 2012 prohibition. WorkSafe banned the type of inverter these systems need, citing significant risks of fire and serious harm if a plug were exposed or handled the wrong way. Rewiring Aotearoa argues in its explainer on the ban that the rule was written for cheap devices that are no longer on the market. The ministry’s review reached a similar conclusion, finding the barrier could be removed if suitable safety standards were developed, and noting that other countries permit plug-in solar with product certification, output limits and other safety features built in.

Regulation Minister David Seymour said the systems suit the people rooftop solar has never reached. “Plug-in systems can be used by renters and people living in apartments who can’t access traditional rooftop solar,” he said in the government release accompanying the report. “If they’re good enough for Germany and the UK, they’re good enough for us.”

Energy Minister Simeon Brown, whose officials are already at an early stage of drafting plug-in standards and working out what safety requirements would need to be met, said the wider package was about cost. “New Zealanders want more control over their power bills and want to harness the power of the sun,” he told 1News. “These proposals will help give power back to the people by making solar uptake cheaper and faster.”

The more striking part of the review is what it found about ordinary rooftop solar, which is already perfectly legal. Installing a small system can require up to six separate sign-offs and five site visits from four different organisations before the switch is flipped. The ministry put a price on that. Getting a residential install approved currently runs to about $640 and three months. Under the recommendations it would be about $200 and six days.

For farms and small businesses, the gap is wider still. A milking shed system can cost up to $11,000 and take six months to get approved. The review reckons that could come down to $1,300 and one month.

Three changes do most of the work. The first is inspections. The review found sending an independent electrical inspector to every job is unnecessary when an accredited installer can do the same check, a change worth up to 45 days and $600 to the customer. The second is lines company processing. Standard residential connection requests would go from ten working days to the next business day, and medium sized installs from more than 30 days to five. The third is resource consent. Installs up to 300kW would become a permitted activity, saving up to 30 days and between $3,000 and $10,000.

Rewiring Aotearoa chief executive Mike Casey said the consent change would land hardest in the regions. “This is good for farmers and would make it a permitted activity status across all councils,” he said in the group’s response to the report. He described the current setup as a mess of local variation. “With 29 different lines companies and different rules across different councils, it’s like there are lots of 1000 piece puzzles and someone’s mixed all the pieces up.”

Casey said the group had asked the ministry to start from scratch rather than tinker. “We encouraged the Ministry to go back to the start and look at this from the customer’s perspective,” he said.

The ministry estimates the full package would deliver net benefits of between $28 million and $50 million over ten years through lower compliance costs, shorter delays and the arrival of plug-in units.

What the review does not touch is the number that stops most households in the first place. Only about 3 to 4 percent of New Zealand homes have solar, and a standard rooftop system still costs somewhere between $8,500 and $11,500 before anyone fills in a form. The ministry’s brief was regulation, not finance, and it says so. Upfront cost and access to lending remain the larger barrier.

That gap is being contested in the election campaign. Labour has proposed subsidies and loan schemes aimed at renters and lower income households, National is offering the reduced planning requirements this review recommends, and the Greens have promised zero interest loans. Whoever forms the next government, the paperwork changes are the part that can move without new money, and much of it sits with regulators rather than Parliament.

For the roughly one in three New Zealand households that rent, and for anyone in an apartment, the plug-in recommendation is the one that matters. It is the first time a government agency here has said out loud that a renter should be allowed to hang a panel off a balcony rail and take a slice off their power bill without asking a landlord to reroof the building. The report puts the timeline for legalisation at nine to twelve months. Seymour has told Stuff the units could be on sale in New Zealand this year.

Would you hang a solar panel off your balcony or fence if it were legal, or do you think the 2012 safety concerns still stand? Let us know 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 🙂