The International Convention Centre (ICC) Sydney is set to host the largest rooftop solar installation of any central business district (CBD) in the Southern Hemisphere, the New South Wales government has announced.
ICC Sydney, government-owned and operating across the Convention, Exhibition and Entertainment Centres, will expand its existing rooftop solar network to more than 18,400 square metres, generating an estimated 2.6GWh annually.
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When combined with renewable energy procurement, the expanded array will enable ICC Sydney to run on 100% renewable energy.
NSW Minister for Planning and Public Spaces Paul Scully said the project showed how greater renewable energy generation could be unlocked in urban areas by using existing building rooftops.
“Hosting the largest solar farm of any CBD in the Southern Hemisphere will help the ICC to reduce emissions and energy costs while also strengthening Sydney’s competitiveness in attracting major international conventions and events,” Scully said.
Based on annual generation, the NSW government said the expansion would make ICC Sydney the fourth-largest solar-powered convention centre in the world, and the largest outside the United States.
A single rooftop project sits within a far larger metropolitan opportunity
The ICC Sydney project is a modest addition in absolute terms compared with the potential scale of rooftop solar across Sydney more broadly.
A 2025 report from engineering consultancy Arcadis, produced with the Committee for Sydney, Endeavour Energy, Ausgrid and Arup, found that a coordinated Sydney Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) could see rooftop solar PV across the metropolitan area generate up to 21GW, enough to meet up to 75% of the city’s annual energy demand if installed across every residential, commercial and industrial roof.
Metropolitan Sydney currently hosts around 3GW of rooftop solar capacity, meeting only 10-12% of total electricity demand. The report identifies industrial warehouses as particularly underused, given their high roof area relative to energy consumption, sometimes capable of generating up to 500% of a building’s own needs.
That gap between commercial and industrial rooftop potential and actual uptake extends well beyond Sydney.
Analysis from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) has separately found that Australian businesses have installed only a fraction of their available rooftop solar potential despite favourable underlying economics, describing the segment as a “missing middle” between household and utility-scale solar deployment.
The ICC Sydney project, while positioned as a leader among global convention venues, illustrates the kind of individual commercial rooftop investment that the report argues remains underexploited at scale across the country, where large single buildings with high energy demand and substantial roof area are precisely the customer profile the missing middle analysis identifies as underserved.
