The Government has agreed to act on every recommendation in the Ministry for Regulation’s review of household and small scale solar, including making plug-in solar panels legal for renters and apartment dwellers. What it has not done is say when that ban will actually lift.
Regulation Minister David Seymour and Energy Minister Simeon Brown confirmed the decision on Monday afternoon, two and a half weeks after the ministry published its report on 30 July. Seymour ordered the review in May, saying he wanted New Zealand to become the easiest country in the world in which to switch to solar. The ministers said the goal now is to make residential and small to medium scale solar installation here the simplest in the developed world.
Plug-in solar is the compact version of rooftop solar. A kit is usually one or two panels with a small inverter built in, and it plugs into an ordinary wall socket rather than being wired into the house by an electrician. That makes it cheap enough to buy outright and portable enough to take to the next rental. It is also illegal in New Zealand, and has been since 2012, when the inverters that make it work were banned over concerns about fire and electric shock.
Seymour said there was no good reason to keep preventing New Zealanders from using it. “Plug-in systems can be used by renters and people living in apartments who can’t access traditional rooftop solar. If they’re good enough for Germany and the UK, they’re good enough for us,” he said.
Most of the package is aimed at the paperwork around conventional rooftop systems. The ministry found that installing a small scale solar system can involve up to six separate sign-offs and five site visits from four different organisations before the power can be switched on. Under the changes, approval for a standard residential installation is meant to fall from about $640 and three months down to $200 and six days. For a farmer putting panels on a milking shed, the ministers say approval costs should drop from as much as $11,000 and six months to $1,300 and one month.
Lines companies would have to move faster as well. The ministry recommended cutting the processing time for a standard residential request from 10 working days to the next working day, and for medium sized installations from more than 30 working days down to five. Work will also begin on trialling what the ministers called a proportionate, risk based inspection model, so that accredited installers can sign off their own work rather than waiting for an electrical inspector to turn up. Seymour said that change on its own could save consumers up to 45 days of waiting and $600.
Larger and ground mounted systems, along with installations in heritage areas and outstanding natural landscapes, would be exempted from needing resource consent. The ministers say that could save up to 30 days of waiting and between $3,000 and $10,000. Across the whole package the ministry estimates net benefits of between $28 million and $50 million over ten years, through lower compliance costs, reduced delays and the use of plug-in solar.
Brown, who has been working on plug-in solar standards separately, said the changes would put power back in people’s hands and on their rooftops. “New Zealanders want more control over their power bills and making it easier to connect solar is one way to do that by allowing people to make use of the free sunshine that lands on their property,” he said. He added that plug-in solar “will also be a game changer for people who rent, meaning people will be able to buy a plug-in solar kit and take it with them if they move house.”
The gap in Monday’s announcement is the calendar. Neither minister named a date for plug-in solar becoming legal, and agreeing to progress a recommendation is not the same thing as changing the rule. Legalising plug-in kits means unwinding the 2012 prohibition on the inverters, amending electrical safety regulations and writing a safety standard for the kits themselves, work that sits across more than one agency. The ministry expected all 15 of its recommendations could be implemented within 18 months of the report, a window that runs past November’s election and into 2028. Eight of them need amendments to the Electricity Industry Participation Code, which the Electricity Authority runs on its own timetable. Others, including the plug-in change, can be done through secondary legislation without a new Act of Parliament.
Until that work is finished, importing, selling or using a plug-in kit here remains against the rules, whatever the political mood around it.
And the political mood is unusually settled. Solar has become one of the few areas of this campaign where the parties are arguing about method rather than direction. National is offering low interest loans and the removal of some planning rules. Labour’s $160 million SolarSaver package, launched in July, would put kickstart subsidies in front of renters and low and middle income households alongside rates linked and lines company loans. The Greens want zero interest loans for panels and batteries, and solar on more than half of all public homes within four years. If you are trying to work out which of those you actually agree with, our voting tool lets you compare the parties policy by policy before you vote.
What none of the regulatory changes touch is the sticker price. The review was explicitly about regulation, and it found real money buried in the paperwork, but a full rooftop system still costs thousands of dollars before a single form is filled in. As RNZ noted when the report landed, others working in the sector have identified upfront cost and access to finance as the bigger barriers. That is why the loans and subsidies have become the political battleground, and it is also why plug-in solar matters more than its modest output suggests. A small kit is the first version of solar that a tenant could plausibly pay for out of savings rather than out of a loan. It is also the only version that is still banned.
Would you put a plug-in panel on a balcony or a rental if the ban lifted, or is the upfront cost of a full rooftop system the thing standing in your way? Have your say 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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