The Australian company behind a leading, home-grown solar roof tile solution has raised more than $A1.1 million as part of an ongoing equity crowdfunding campaign, in a bid to expand into US market and take on Elon Musk’s Tesla Solar Roof.
Volt’s crowdfunding campaign was launched to the public on December 01 as part of the maiden fundraising effort led by Birchal First Syndicate program, which invites angel investors to support Victorian hardware technology businesses.
With a week of the fundraising campaign left to go, Volt is aiming to hit a $3 million maximum target, with more than 200 investors backing its product and plans, so far.
Volt Solar Tiles, a subsidiary of the busy commercial and large-scale solar company Leeson Group, was officially launched in October 2022 from its base in Victoria, with a product it claims is quicker, cheaper and easier to install than Musk’s and able to compete on energy output and cost with higher end rooftop PV systems.
Leeson Group has built the business around two key partnerships, with Bristile Roofing in Australia and Spain-based terracotta roof tile manufacturer La Escandella as its global distributor outside of Australia.
Bristile, which is a part of the ASX-listed building materials group Brickworks, holds a significant market share for new home roofing products in Australia, while La Escandella is expected to open up export opportunities for Volt to 85 countries.
Last year, the company installed a massive 100kW Volt system on a house in Türkiye that – at the time – was believed to be the world’s largest, at twice the size of the biggest Tesla solar roofs installed at that point.
In Australia, Volt recently collaborated with Cerámica La Escandella and Bristile to integrate its solar tiles with terracotta tiles on a heritage-listed home in Tasmania (see image above).
Leeson says business has been given a major boost by recent changes to the National Construction Code that essentially make rooftop solar in one form or another an essential ingredient for every new home that major housing developers build.
“So if you think about those 130,000 semi-detached homes built every single year, this market’s between 800 megawatts (MW) and a gigawatt (1GW) per year,” Volt founder and CEO Peter Leeson tells Renew Economy.
“I don’t think anyone clearly understands the opportunity, and particularly a lot of solar businesses, they’re not seeing the ease of doing new home installations, where … you don’t ever deal with solar Vic rebates, you don’t you don’t have to put up guardrail – it’s already got scaffold installed …all the cabling is done internally. So it’s a huge, huge market.”
With this sort of momentum behind it, the company is now looking to make a serious move into the US market.
Leeson says Volt is collaborating with local roofing companies there – including one of the country’s biggest – and finalising a US-specific design prototype that meets American roofing and solar standards and sets the stage for its planned launch by mid-2025.
He believes his company’s product has a good chance of success in the US, both off the back of its track record at home and in Europe – including bagging the Good Design Award Gold Winner in Engineering Design – and by providing a product that is superior on a number of levels to the Tesla Solar Roof.
This includes ease of installation, thanks to the Volt Solar Tiles’ interlocking system that allows them to click together and integrate with standard roof tiles – and installed by traditional roofing companies – rather than being a highly specialised whole-of-roof solution like Tesla’s. This also makes the solar tile business easily scalable.
Most importantly, the Volt claims to be up to five times more affordable than a Tesla Solar Roof. In 2023, independent advisory outfit Pottinger found the Volt to be the highest efficiency (19.5% for the higher end Planum product), lowest cost solar tile in the world – as Leeson told Renew Economy’s Solar Insiders Podcast, at the time.
“[Tesla’s] solar roof is … ridiculously expensive,” Leeson says. “The comparison for a 280 square metre roof with 8kW of solar on a re-roof is that a Tesla roof costs about $US230,000 while Volt and a Bristile roof are about $A52,000 in Australia.”
Leeson says that following the initial launch next year, which will target key states like California and Florida, Volt plans to expand into additional markets like Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Texas, where renewables adoption is growing, and the need for innovative, cost-effective solar solutions continues to rise.
“We’ve got a massive strategic partner over there in the US, they’re one of the US largest rooftop manufacturers, and the size of market is absurd,” he tells Renew Economy.
“California builds 120,000 new homes per year … and they [have already] mandated solar on every home …And then over on the east coast, in Florida, they re-roof homes every 20 years, so there’s huge demand for re-roofing there … and if you add renewables into that, you get income tax credits on the renewables, so that there’s just this absurdly large opportunity over there.
“But we’re very aware that you need to do a US entry correctly, and that’s why we’ve proven our partnership model here,” Leeson says.
“In Australia we’ve got 50 Volt partners, 17 roofers, a big strategic partner. And in the US, we’ll do something very similar.”
Leeson says raising money through crowdfunding has been a unique opportunity to attract a broad range of investors, while also building the company’s base of passionate community of supporters.
“We’ve sort of got two different types of investors,” he says. “There are the wholesale or sophisticated investors… who are really interested in these early startup technology businesses that should have huge potential to scale.
“That side of the investment …is allowing us to get the capital to grow globally, but it’s also creating this huge network of champions for our business in that sophisticated wholesale space.
“And then you’ve got the retail investors, which are … mums, dads, industry people, people who want to be involved in those early stage startups, but can’t [usually] get access,” Leeson says.
“So, say we get 300 or 400 of these retail investors, we’ve got this huge network of influence and market across Australia and so that, therefore, drives demand – it drives the conversation about solar tiles. It’s actually product that’s available.
“And so that awareness, that’s one of the reasons we really like the crowdsource funding, because we’re taking the community on a journey with us, and they become the advocates and the champions for our business.”
