Low Income Solar at scale

OVERVIEW

With support from the Victorian Government, the Eastern Alliance for Greenhouse Action (EAGA) engaged Urban EP to deliver the second phase of the Solar Rates business case. This business case addressed financing mechanisms and collaboration models to help lower income households to invest in onsite solar PV systems, assisted with low-cost finance.

KEY INFO

Location:

Gippsland VIC

Stakeholders:

VIC Government EAGA

Solutions:

Solar

THE BRIEF

With support from the Victorian Government, the Eastern Alliance for Greenhouse Action (EAGA) engaged Urban EP to deliver the second phase of the Solar Rates business case.

This business case addressed financing mechanisms and collaboration models to help lower income households to invest in onsite solar PV systems, assisted with low-cost finance.

The investigation would present solutions that could be applied at the state scale, and which could be improved with additional partners and future cycles of innovation.

THE RESULTS

• Gained common ground on the problem and the opportunity to respond with an intervention.

• Assessed options to scale low income household access to solar PV, with a focus on improving access to up-front finance on cash positive terms, and clarifying roles across the sectors involved.

• Consulted bank representatives to determine options and terms for providing finance, given the target households and activities of local and state government.

• Quantified outcomes of different delivery and financing options, with a priority on impacts on households, lenders, and state and local government partners.

Urban EP presented recommendations to assist local government, state government and the finance sector to work together in an integrated approach to effectively scale-up an initial program to 52,000 households, and build upwards from there. (All project materials are available here.)

The report was launched via a roundtable, coinciding with the Victorian Government’s announcement of $0.76M for EAGA and its partners to deliver the Solar Savers project.

Solar Savers is testing a model for program scale-up, aiming to install solar PV on low income and vulnerable households across twenty municipalities between October 2016 and June 2019.