Veronica lives alone in a three-bedroom terrace at The Gantry – an award-winning 2013 development in Camperdown, Sydney – now that her son has moved out. Since her strata switched on a shared 26kW solar system in November 2025, her monthly electricity bill has dropped from around $120–$130 to $70–$80, a saving of roughly $50 a month, just in time for a run of 40-degree days over summer.
Money was the main driver for most of her neighbours, but Veronica also thinks about the bigger picture:
"Where technology is heading is using more and more power. You only have so much fossil fuels in the ground, it takes generations to get those out, so looking at more sustainable sources of electricity becomes important."
For her, solar is as much about sustainable resources for the next generation as it is about a cheaper energy bill.
The Gantry neighbourhood is made up of 4 apartment buildings and 26 terraces, which are split into six smaller strata groups. Veronica's section of 13 terraces is the only one of the six strata to install solar so far, and it took years longer than that of a typical single-home installation.
Veronica's apartment building in Camperdown, NSW
The terraces share both their rooftops and a single electrical room in the car park below, so one owner installing solar on their own would never have worked. A next-door neighbour first raised the idea years earlier, but as soon as they looked into it, the roof-sharing problem became obvious: with two- and three-bedroom terraces alternating along the same roofline, there was no way to give one household its own private system.
That first attempt led the strata to commission a feasibility study, and it's where Veronica first heard about Allume and SolShare, the technology that splits solar generated from one shared rooftop system fairly across multiple households. Nothing came of it immediately – the idea only gained momentum a few years later, after Veronica had been involved in a solar feasibility study for an investment property she owns, and heard that the New South Wales government was preparing a new grant for apartment buildings. She brought the idea back to her fellow owners, and that's what set this installation in motion.
The Solar for Apartment Residents (SoAR) grant covers 50% of eligible installation costs, which was enough to change the maths for a strata that didn't have much sitting in its capital works fund. Because the grant doesn't cover everything (things like building insurance and the SolShare Wi-Fi router aren't eligible items), it worked out closer to 42% of the total project cost. Owners still needed to raise a special levy, but at around $12,000 across the whole strata, it came to somewhere between $800 and $1,200 per terrace, depending on each owner's unit entitlements – a formula that sets how strata costs are split based on the relative size and value of each property.
Getting the go-ahead meant holding a general meeting to pass a sustainability resolution, since the installation makes changes to common property. Unlike other strata resolutions, which need 75% approval, sustainability resolutions only need a simple majority of those who show up to vote. Eight of the strata's 13 owners voted, and that was enough to pass.
The strata then received quotes from three installers before choosing Solahart, a certified SolShare installation partner, and Veronica says the SolShare setup itself was refreshingly simple to understand, even for owners who found the underlying solar technology harder to picture.
The system has cut Veronica's bill by about $50 a month since going live, and she's become a regular user of the SolCentre dashboard, which shows how much solar the building is generating throughout the day.
She now times her dishwasher, washing machine and dryer for the middle of the day when solar generation is highest, and checks the weather forecast to decide whether a load of washing can wait for a sunnier day.
Allume's SolCentre dashboard
Veronica's advocacy for shared solar isn't limited to her own building. She's also an investor in a 22-unit apartment building nearby in Newtown, where she helped drive a similar SoAR-funded installation that became the first in New South Wales completed under the grant. That milestone earned her an interview with 9News, alongside NSW Minister for Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Heritage Penny Sharpe, who visited the site to mark the occasion.
Her advice to anyone in a strata building considering solar is simple:
"I think while the New South Wales government have this grant, it's worthwhile applying for it. I think it's far more expensive to do it without the grant." —Veronica
And without a shared allocation technology like SolShare, she adds, there's no fair way to split solar output across owners in the first place.