Last updated 10 September 2026
Quick answer: No. The NSW Net Zero Government Operations Policy only covers state government agencies, so no council has a legal duty to report solar generation. What councils do have is a duty to report progress against their own Delivery Program each year, and grant conditions on any solar paid for by the Community Energy Upgrades Fund. Both need the same thing: a reliable record of what each system produced.
NSW state agencies now have to publish how much their rooftop solar generates each year, and it’s easy to assume the same rules apply to councils. They don’t, at least not from that policy. But it pays to be clear about what councils are and aren’t on the hook for, because the answer is “less than agencies, but not nothing”.
Does the Net Zero Government Operations Policy apply to councils?
No. The policy applies to general government sector agencies with 100 or more staff, and it defines general government sector by reference to the Classification of Agencies in NSW Budget Paper 1. Local government is a separate sphere of government and isn’t in that list. So the annual requirement to publish installed solar capacity, generation in MWh and bill savings, which I covered in a separate post on agency reporting, doesn’t reach councils.
If anyone tells you otherwise, or you see it on a vendor’s website, they’ve misread the policy. There is no mandatory solar reporting obligation on NSW councils at the time of writing.
What councils do have to report
Councils report under the Integrated Planning and Reporting framework in the Local Government Act 1993. Every council has a Community Strategic Plan, a four year Delivery Program that turns the plan into commitments, and a one year Operational Plan. Section 428 of the Act requires an annual report, within five months of the end of the financial year, on the council’s achievements in implementing the Delivery Program.
That matters for solar because of what councils have put in those documents. A lot of NSW councils have adopted net zero or renewable electricity targets for their own operations, often through the Cities Power Partnership or their own climate strategies, and those targets sit in the Community Strategic Plan or the Delivery Program. Once a target is in the Delivery Program, every annual report has to say how the council went against it, and targets that sit only in the Community Strategic Plan get reported on at the end of each council term. If the strategy says “council operations powered by 50% renewable electricity by 2030” and a chunk of that is rooftop solar on the depot, the pool and the library, then someone has to be able to say what those systems produced.
It’s a softer obligation than the agency one. There’s no prescribed table and no central publication of the numbers. On the other hand, it’s a public document that councillors and residents read, and a number that can’t be backed up tends to get asked about.
The Community Energy Upgrades Fund
The second obligation is contractual rather than legislative. The Community Energy Upgrades Fund is a $100 million Commonwealth program that gave councils matched funding for energy upgrades at community facilities: solar and batteries on pools and sports halls, heat pumps, LED lighting and so on. Round 1 funded 62 councils and Round 2 funded 66, with successful Round 2 applicants announced state by state through November and December 2025.
To win the money, councils had to provide calculated energy savings and emissions reductions using the abatement calculator on business.gov.au. That figure sits behind the agreed outcomes in the grant agreement. The Round 2 guidelines say grantees report on progress against agreed project milestones and outcomes, submit an end of project report with evidence and recent electricity bills, and complete a proforma case study so the Commonwealth can evaluate what the upgrades delivered. The department can also request an independent audit.
So if your council took CEUF money for solar, you told the Commonwealth what it would save, and you’ll be asked to show what it did. That’s a lot easier when the generation data has been collected from day one than when someone has to reconstruct it from portal screenshots at acquittal time.
What this means in practice
Neither of these is a solar reporting mandate, and I wouldn’t dress them up as one. But both come back to the same practical problem. Council solar is usually installed site by site over several years, by different installers, on different inverter brands, and each installer leaves behind a different portal login. Nobody in the works team has time to check ten portals every week, so faults surface at the next service visit and the generation numbers get pulled together in a rush once a year.
The fix is to have one place that records what every system produced, flags when one drops off, and keeps the history. Then the Delivery Program figure and the grant acquittal are a lookup rather than a project.
Where PV Fleet fits
PV Fleet connects to the inverter monitoring your systems already have, any brand, with no new hardware, and gives you every council building on one dashboard. Each site gets a written monthly report covering generation, faults, data gaps and what to do next. Savings are calculated from generation and a tariff you set. When something fails, your team gets an SMS or email within hours. Pricing is from $790 per site per year, so even a 20 site council is well under the $250,000 tendering threshold in the Local Government Act.
If you look after the solar on council buildings and want to see what the record looks like, book a 15 minute demo.
And if you are planning a new system rather than reporting on an existing one, the free solar tools will give you roof azimuth, pitch, panel count and expected yield for any address before you talk to an installer.