Hornsby Council’s community embrace solar with the help of SunSPOT and APVI’s solar education webinars
On Susie Smith’s last day on the job as Sustainability Officer at Hornsby Shire Council, we discussed the significant growth in solar uptake in the community and how APVI’s SunSPOT, Solar Installations Dashboard and solar education webinars have contributed to their solar success story.
Residential and commercial PV system capacity in the Hornsby Shire shot up 63% in two years
The sprawling but leafy Hornsby City Council lies north west of Sydney’s CBD and has a population of over 150,000. From December 2020 to December 2022, the installed solar capacity in the area went from 73,700 kW to 120,000 kW. Over 3000 new systems were installed in the two year period and the number of commercial solar installations increased 144% (from 1218 to 2966).
Susie Smith told us, “We have an umbrella sustainability strategy that includes corporate and community strategies for getting to net zero by 2050. The education actions outlined in the strategy are quite clear: to use tools that are accessible, user friendly and that help people make the right decisions.”
“Our efforts to educate the community about their energy use and rooftop solar has really paid off. All suburbs have increased their PV capacity since 2020, Cherrybrook in particular,” says Susie Smith.
The Australian PV Institute’s SunSPOT is a key element in the Council’s community solar PV uptake programs. The clever online solar and battery sizing tool can assess the shading impacts on a roof, provide a recommended system size to meet the household or business’s electricity needs, and provide tailored estimates of the output and savings from various configurations of solar and batteries.
Residents and business owners alike have benefitted
Residents and business owners can use it privately to familiarise themselves with the potential cost, savings and size of system on their roof, and do the same with a battery.
“We use SunSPOT in our workshops and promote it to the community to help people get the understanding of solar and the information they need from an independent source,” says Susie Smith.
“We have received great feedback about SunSPOT. People love seeing what size system they can fit on their roof and how much it could save them.”
Easy tracking and anlaysis of solar installations
The Council is able to track the whole LGA and each suburb on major sustainability KPIs using APVI’s Solar Installation Dashboard and the Resilient Sydney Dashboard that aggregates energy water and waste data from providers.
See the graph below from Hornsby Shire Council’s Solar Installation Dashboard from APVI.
Graph taken from the Solar Installation Dashboard for Hornsby Shire Council. It shows the cumulative growth in installed solar PV system capacity month on month.
Easy tracking of community interest in solar and SunSPOT and the response to solar campaigns
Susie and her team can also easily gauge the response to their solar education campaigns and events by checking the number of times a solar rooftop assessment has been done in each suburb.
This is a feature of the Solar Installation Dashboard that comes with a Council subscription to SunSPOT (see the screenshot below).
The response to the sustainability team’s outreach and engagement initiatives from Dec- March is evident in the graph below which shows that over 500 online rooftop SunSPOT solar assessments were done in the LGA by interested ratepayers wanting to find out what they could save with solar.
The Council can track the number of times SunSPOT is used to assess a rooftop, and in which suburb in the area, through the Solar Installation Dashboard.
APVI presented a solar education webinar for local residents
A spike in rooftop assessments can be seen in February and March which was when Hornsby and Mosman Councils engaged members of APVI’s SunSPOT team to present a solar education webinar for residents.
It was a big success with participants learning how rooftop solar saves owners money, how to increase those savings and how to use SunSPOT to do feasibility estimates of solar and batteries on their own rooftops.
Susie enthused; “Getting the APVI to deliver professional solar education webinars frees up staff time to do what we do best - we partner for the wins!”
More about APVI’s council tools
The premium version of SunSPOT involves mapping the area with LiDAR data and is available to the public when a Council takes up a subscription. The Solar Installation Dashboard is provided as part of this subscription.
The standard version of SunSPOT is accessible everywhere but does not use LiDAR and is not able to automatically assess the impact of shading and the characteristics of the roof.
For subscription pricing and more information about APVI’s solar tools for Councils, please head to www.sunspot.org.au or email sunspot@apvi.org.au.
