How a couple of sparkies ended up doing 10,000 installs.

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.

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.