How a couple of sparkies ended up doing 10,000 installs.
Clean Power was founded on a simple frustration: too many solar companies sold a system and disappeared. We built the business we would have wanted to buy from.
A van, two sparkies and a lot of other people’s mistakes
Clean Power did not start with a business plan. It started with a pattern nobody could ignore.
By 2017 rooftop solar in Australia had stopped being novel. Prices had fallen far enough that almost anyone could afford a system, and a wave of companies had appeared to sell them. Some were excellent. A lot were not.
What our founders kept encountering, job after job, were systems that had been sold rather than designed. Panels facing the wrong way because that side of the roof was easier. Inverters chosen on cost alone. Paperwork that had never been lodged. And behind almost all of it, the same structure: a sales company at the front, a rotating cast of subcontractors at the back, and nobody who owned the outcome.
The fix seemed obvious, if inconvenient. Keep the design work in-house rather than outsourcing the thinking. Use accredited installers you actually know. Make the person who sells the job responsible for it being installed properly. It costs more to run a business that way, which is exactly why a lot of companies do not.
How it grew
From five staff in the Illawarra to six hubs across four states and territories.
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2017
Founded by two electricians
A team of five: two on lead generation, one in sales, and one install crew. A joint venture followed, for growth and reach.
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2018
The first warehouse, in Wollongong
Our first warehouse, and the first headquarters of Clean Power.
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2019
Into Queensland
We expanded into Queensland.
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2020
A signwritten fleet
A new fleet of fifteen signwritten Clean Power vehicles.
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2021
Into the ACT
We expanded into the ACT.
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2023
Fiftieth staff member
The team reached fifty people.
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2024
Fifteen hundred VPP customers
The first fifteen hundred customers connected to a virtual power plant.
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2025
Mascot, and Burleigh Heads
A hundred and twenty person head office in Mascot, and the purchase of the Burleigh Heads warehouse and office space.
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2026
Into South Australia
We expanded into South Australia.
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Today
Six hubs, four states and territories
Mascot and Unanderra in Sydney and the Illawarra, Mayfield West in the Hunter, Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast, Lawson in the ACT and Lonsdale in South Australia.
Batteries changed the question
For most of the last decade, the case for solar was about generating power during the day and exporting the surplus. Feed-in tariffs made that worth doing. Then they fell, and the maths shifted.
The value now sits in using what you generate rather than selling it. That means storage, and it means designing around the evening peak, when households draw the most power and grid electricity costs the most.
It also made the design work harder and more important. Sizing a battery badly is expensive in a way that sizing panels badly never quite was. That suits a business with its own designers, and it does not suit one that subcontracts the thinking.
What has not changed
The company is still family owned and family run, and the founders are still involved daily. The support team still sits separately from sales, because the moment those two functions merge, aftercare quietly becomes a sales channel.
The work is still done by local SAA accredited installers we use again and again rather than whoever is cheapest that week, and the design work is still ours rather than something handed to a third party.
Ten thousand installs later, the thing we are most careful about is the thing that is easiest to lose at scale: that the person you speak to actually knows your job.
Talk to someone who does this every day
What our customers say
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