Making it easy to meet 1st July 2025 NSW Strata Law requirements Encouraging the Uptake of Sustainability In Strata

If you were wondering how your strata scheme can make it easy to meet the new sustainability obligations, read on....

New strata laws in NSW, effective July 1, 2025 create some new and additional obligations on residential and commercial strata schemes relating to sustainability which need to be met on an annual basis.

The official notice is on the NSW government website here.

​There are 3 main areas where each strata scheme needs to meet a checkbox.

1) By-laws which ban sustainability infrastructure need to be removed
This applies to any strata schemes which are not heritage listed or in heritage conservation areas where there are still valid reasons that sustainability infrastructure may be banned e.g. solar panels typically can't be installed on a heritage building if they are viewable from the main street entrance which is the entrance to the heritage building.

If your strata scheme isn't a heritage listed building or in a heritage conservation area there are a number of by-laws which your strata scheme may have passed which now have to be removed. Some common by-laws which can be considered to ban sustainability are by-laws preventing washing to be hung on balconies, preventing external shades or awnings to be installed on windows or balconies to reduce heat, preventing rooftop solar panels being installed due to aesthetics, preventing EV chargepoints being installed due to aesthetics or fire risk, preventing air conditioners or heat pumps to be installed due to noise, preventing e-bikes or scooters to be charged inside apartments, preventing "vegepods" to be installed due to them attracting pests etc

Any of these "anti-sustainability" by-laws need to be removed from the consolidated by-laws of the strata scheme. This also opens up the possibility for a lot of strata buildings to pass by-laws which allow the installation of balcony solar systems which hang over balconies in the future. More information is in our article Balcony Solar: Will Australia follow Germany's Lead.

If you have multiple buildings and one building overseas a rooftop area of another building in the same strata scheme, it won't be possible to have a by-law which refuses solar panel installation due to "reflectivity" or "because it isn't in character with the building".

If you have a by-law which prohibits coloured solar inverters (e.g. red) being installed on a common property wall and saying that these must be either black or white, then this by-law will need to be amended to allow inverters of any colour. If you have a by-law which says that any batteries which are installed aren't allowed to have LED strip lighting on them if they are visible on common property walls then this would also have to be altered.

If you have a by-law which bans installation of EV charging stations from different manufacturers which look different from each other behind carspaces, then this wouldn't hold up either.

It will be interesting to see if this extends to "overly controlling" community association by-laws. Some high end community associations have had architects embed by-laws that solar panels need to be ALL black and mirror the roof lines in perfect concordance. This has even extended to the point of creating false black triangular panels and installing these next to real solar panels, so that the sheer black aesthetic of the solar system forms a geometic trapozoid mirroring the gabled rooftops. This was something that was so oppressive to the installation of solar panels that no building in the community association ever installed a solar system until this requirement was lifted.

2) Need to consider sustainability at each AGM
There is now a need to consider environmental sustainability within the scheme, including consideration of the common property annual energy and water consumption and expenditure.

For a refresher on what sustainability involves, we can look to the NSW Sustainability Infrastructure Amendment to the NSW strata schemes act which passed in 2021.

Sustainability infrastructure means any change to part of the common property (which includes the installation, removal, modification or replacement of anything on or forming part of that property) for any one or more of the following purposes--
a.to reduce the consumption of energy or water or to increase the efficiency of its consumption,
b.to reduce or prevent pollution,
c.to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill,
d.to increase the recovery or recycling of materials,
e.to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,
f.to facilitate the use of sustainable forms of transport, Note. For example, installing electric vehicle charging stations.

The electricity, gas (if applicable) and water consumption in dollars is always in the admin accounts of the strata scheme prepared for the annual general meeting. It isn't very difficult to check the box of looking at an item which is already in the accounts.  Perhaps what would have been a bit better from a sustainability perspective is if at least one member of the strata committee was actually required to view at least one electricity and one gas bill which the strata scheme received each year. However, the common practice is that strata committee members never actually view the actual bills and a strata manager's accounts department is the one which receives the bills, pays the amount and enters it into the general ledger. As the strata committee members never actually look at kilowatt hours (kWh) or megajoules (MJ) on these bills, there isn't really an intuition being built as to whether the building is actually consuming more energy each year, or just paying more for it due to the ongoing upward spiral of energy prices.

However, the fact that sustainability needs to be considered as a line item on each AGM along with other compulsory items to consider e.g. health and safety is overall a good thing.

3) Need to consider costs of sustainability infrastructure when updating the capital works plan
Some strata plans will hire a consultant to do a sustainability report which is tailored to their building and use the capital cost estimates from the sustainability report as inputs when updating the capital works plan.

A number of local councils offer free sustainability reports to strata schemes and a number of strata schemes which have participated in these programs over the past decade will already have cost estimates on hand.

Other strata schemes will hire a quantity surveyor to update their capital works plan and some generic costings will be included into the capital works plan by the quantity surveyor.

For those strata schemes which are looking to do the minimum and meet their requirements, they might consider some capital costs from case studies of similar apartment buildings which are available on the internet.

For those that are really short of time, Wattblock has developed a free online questionnaire which will allow a strata scheme to formally record that it has participated in encouraging the uptake of sustainability in the strata scheme.

Following the 2023 EV Charging grants for NSW strata schemes and the 2025 Solar forApartment Residents (SoAR) co-funding, it is great to see the NSW government continuing to drive sustainability into over 91,000 strata schemes across the state consisting of over 1m lots and housing 17% of the state's population.

Brent Clark
Contributor