We Took a Building Off-Grid. Nobody Noticed.
- 21 hours ago
- 5 min read
Fifty-one apartments in Midland just showed WA what a building can be when energy is designed in from day one.
Halfway through the opening of Tuohy Gardens, while a violinist was playing to a room full of guests, I switched the entire building from the grid to its own battery and back again.
Nobody noticed. Not a flicker of the lights, not a pause in the music, not a single person looking up at the lights. That is the whole point.
A zero-millisecond transfer from grid to off-grid is the kind of thing that sounds like a spec sheet line until you stand in a room where it happens and nothing happens. Six years ago we would have been proud to manage it with a blip. Now it is invisible — and it costs the end consumer nothing extra.
What we opened
Tuohy Gardens is a ~$15 million, four-storey, 51-apartment affordable build-to-rent development in the heart of Midland’s urban renewal precinct, delivered by Bluerock Projects. It is the largest timber-constructed residential building in Western Australia, it carries a 7-star NatHERS rating, and it was built in eighteen months — on budget.
If you have spent any time in construction lately, that last clause is the remarkable one. Material costs are up, compliance is up, rates have moved, trades are scarce. Delivering a net-zero-capable, smart, energy-efficient building inside that window and inside the number is genuinely hard.
Ally Strauss opened the afternoon by congratulating the Bluerock team — Stuart, Daniel, Tim and David — who are on a mission to deliver a thousand build-to-rent dwellings over the next decade for a market that is struggling to access affordable housing.
She also made the case personally. We lived in the earlier DeHavilland building next door and barely touched the air conditioning or the heating. Where we live now, a conventional concrete apartment, is freezing unless we turn the heat up. Thermal comfort is not an abstraction when you have lived on both sides of it.
What Element47 delivered
The first building we did with Bluerock, six years ago, ran at roughly 70% renewable energy with battery storage. For 2020 that was cutting edge, and it has run without drama ever since.
Tuohy Gardens is a step change.
System | What is installed |
Solar | 130 kW of rooftop PV |
Battery storage | 414 kWh of modular Signergy batteries |
Control | 170kW of hybrid inverters linked to a centralised microgrid gateway with Sigenergy |
Resilience and Demand Management | Zero-millisecond grid-to-off-grid transfer, including EV loads — tested live on the day |
Carbon | Net positive — the building is designed to generate more over a year than it consumes |
EV charging | Capacity for a DC fast charger up to 130 kW, and/or charging across the ~75 car bays (on car stackers). Visitor bays first, 2x public 25kW DC vehicle to grid chargers, scaling toward full coverage |
Hot water | Communal hot water system provided in partnership with Rheem and Hindmarsh Plumbing provides energy efficient heat pump hot water 24/7 and reduces peak demand and infrastructure costs for the developer |
Metering | Electricity, hot and cold water metering, plus an embedded network alongside the microgrid embedded network |
Comms | Integrated communications and security, delivered with Fibrenet |
The metering matters more than it sounds. Because we meter at that granularity, we can see exactly where renewable energy goes in the building, and how much grid power versus on-site renewable power each tenant is actually using. You cannot manage what you cannot see, and you certainly cannot bill it fairly.
And critically: none of this added cost for the end consumer, and it did not blow Stuart’s budget. Keeping the capital cost in line is what keeps the rent affordable for the tenants who move in.
Why 75 bays of EV capacity, when nobody is asking for it yet
Roughly 30% of new car sales in Australia are now electric. The residents moving into Tuohy Gardens this year mostly do not need a charger. The residents moving in three years from now will.
Retrofitting charging into a finished basement is expensive and disruptive; provisioning for it during construction is cheap. We have designed for the building the site will be in 2032, not the one it is in today — which is the same argument for the switchboard capacity, the risers and the gateway.
What the room heard
Stuart Hawley of Bluerock was blunt about the path here. Everyone told them you could not do build-to-rent in WA, you could not do timber construction at this scale, and affordable housing did not stack up. They did it anyway, and they are doing it again in Rockingham — 167 apartments and 33 townhouses.
On why he partnered with us: a lot of people in the renewable energy market looked at the first project (DeHavilland Apartments) and said it could not be done. Andrew and Ally said it could, and then they delivered. He was also clear that passion is not enough — it has to be economically viable to roll out at scale. Bluerock works inside the framework government provides, without subsidies, and the numbers have to stack up inside the project. We agree. That constraint is the reason this is repeatable.
Liz Atkins gave the wider view. Synergy’s coal-fired stations in Collie close by 2030 and that energy still has to come from somewhere. WA is already a world leader in distributed energy, with among the fastest growth in solar and now batteries anywhere — not as a future projection, as a present fact. Her point about Tuohy Gardens was that none of the individual pieces are new. What is new is that they are brought together and scheduled, which turns a building into a grid management asset. The sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
Her warning was that policy and the rules have not caught up. Distributed energy spent twenty years as a supporting actor in the market design, and obligations still get written into procedures rather than rules. Buildings like this need to become regular infrastructure, not novel exceptions.
Ray Wills closed with the framing that stuck with most people in the room. Adding solar was the fastest change in human history to our energy systems — faster than nuclear, coal, gas or hydro. As of 2026, batteries are faster still. The two fastest technologies in human history are solar, beaten by batteries.
Then the line that should worry us all in the best way: this building should not be a flagship next year. It should be the standard. Planners, politicians and bureaucrats will only adopt it if the people who build it keep saying so out loud.
From flagship to standard
That is the tension worth sitting with. Everything at Tuohy Gardens is commercially available today. The solar is ordinary. The batteries are ordinary. Heat pumps and EV chargers are ordinary. The engineering that makes them behave as one coordinated system is where the work is — and it has to happen at design stage, because it touches the architectual, electrical, hydraulic and mechanical services drawings, engineerings and layout, the switchboard, the risers, the metering, the comms, the fire strategy and the car park.
Our mission has not changed: convert every building to solar, batteries and microgrids, one building at a time. Tuohy Gardens is one building. Rockingham is the next.
The question
If a 51-apartment affordable build-to-rent project in Midland can be net positive carbon, ride through a grid outage without anyone noticing, and still land on budget — what is the excuse for the building going up on your site next year?
I would like to hear the honest answer. If it is cost, capacity, or nobody has shown you how the numbers work, tell us — that is exactly the conversation we want to have.
Get in touch with Element47 to talk through what this looks like on your project.
Thanks to Bluerock Projects, Fibrenet, our speakers, and everyone who came out to Midland. Film and photography by Beth Cole Films.
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