Re: Per-house solar potential program with council

[Cameron Shorter]

Folks CCed,

Within a year, we collectively should be able to send a personalised household solar/battery potential report to every house within Australia and New Zealand.

The emailed report should come from a trusted local source such as council, with endorsement from Rewiring Australia/New Zealand and University endorsement, followed up with an invitation to talk with a trusted advisor, such as the service provided by ZapCat.

This email is to introduce you all, and showcase how you are involved:

+solarmap-nz-tech (public email list) +Shreyas Rama  +Rafferty Parker +Hamish Bowman +Jenny Sahng +Richard Wesley 

* We are building a per-building detailed solar analysis pipeline for all of New Zealand, using open source tools + free New Zealand datasets. This code could be extended for this use case. More at: NZ-Solar-Pipeline-README.

We are 3 to 6 months off having a working prototype.

+Warren Yates +Chris Lee

* Have manually created a report for every viable household for Sydney's Northern Beaches Council, which is about to be used and tested.

+Piroska Bisits-Bullen +Jimmy Li 

* Zapcat social enterprise providing trusted solar advisor services to councils.

+Kristen McDonald +Tim Baxter +Josh Ellison +Jenny Sahng 

* Rewiring Australia/New Zealand. Trusted brand, connected with community groups and governments.

+Anna Bruce +Mike Roberts 

* People behind the Sunspot calculator. This front end would dovetail nicely with the NZ solar pipeline we are building.

On Sun, 23 Nov 2025 at 08:17, Warren Yates <warren...@ieee.org> wrote:

Hi Cameron

Great to have your interest!

Answers below

Warren

On Sat, Nov 22, 2025 at 12:01 PM Cameron Shorter <cameron...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Warren (and Chris),

It was great to sit next to you at Zali's office the other day, and hear about your proposal to council to post a per-house solar potential summary.

1. Did you manage to convince council to proceed? Or would you look broader for help?

The person on Council assigned to work with us on the project is genuinely overloaded but finally our project has reached the top of her to do list so we should see some action soon, We are meeting with herboss in the new year to talk about resource allocation and also with a councilor

2. Do you have a write up of your proposal somewhere? Maybe on a web page somewhere at a URL?

3. Warren, Chris, I'm interested to know technically how you created the report.

3.1 How manual / automated was it?

 

We have to manually type in the address to SunSpot and manually place panels where SunSpot tells us they will be most effective and manually take a screen shot of the roof. Once all houses in the street are done we have to manually enter the data into a spreadsheet and collect and rename the image files, Mail Merge then uses the data and images to produce the letters  

3.2 What technical stack did you build upon? SunSpot? ESRI? QGIS? 

SunSpot 

3.3 What source datasets did you make use of? Google? NSW Lands? Council?

 

Nearmap and what is provided in SunSpot 

3.4 Is it something that could scale across the country?

The idea is to  see how effective it is as a motivator first. If effective it could possibly be automated (via a granT) usining AI 

3.5 What else would be needed technically to achieve this? (I have a geospatial software engineering and open source community building background.)

You may be just the person we need to undertake 3.4!

 

3.6 Maybe we can roll out through Rewiring Australia community groups?

All the best,

Cameron (I'm that guy currently helping with Rewiring NZ Solar Potential)