Image: Allume
Australian shared rooftop solar pioneer, Allume, has raised a further $A10.2 million in support of its SolShare solution for apartments, including more than $A8 million from the UK arm of European energy giant E.ON.
Allume switched on its first commercial shared solar system in May of 2018, at a mixed residential and retail building in bayside Melbourne, and has not looked back since, taking its solar ceiling-smashing technology around the country and to booming overseas markets, including the US.
The latest UK-based fundraising round follows successful raisings of $2.2 million in 2019, $6 million in 2021 and $7 million in 2022, with backers ranging from US investors Elemental Excelerator and the Schmidt Family Foundation, to local investors Taronga, Trawalla and Mirvac.
In 2024 Allume also secured a $3.8 million grant from the federal government’s Industry Growth Program, to help scale its local manufacturing.
Backed by incentive schemes in Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT, Allume says its installation base is growing by 10% a month and its revenue is forecast to more than double in calendar 2025.
The Melbourne-based company is on track for 10,000 apartments to be connected globally by the end of the year.
“We’re seeing a huge acceleration in demand over the past couple of years,” Allume CEO and co-founder Cameron Knox said this week.
“We are currently growing at 10% per month and expect to have connected over 10,000 apartments across Australia, the UK and the US by the end of this year.
“Our capital injection, led by E.ON UK, will enable us to further accelerate this growth, whilst unlocking opportunities to expand our product offerings and markets.”
Chris Norbury, CEO of E.ON UK, says the company’s investment in Allume marks an important step towards making the clean energy transition more inclusive.
“More than a fifth of British homes – five million – are low and medium rise apartment buildings with rooftop space for solar panels, but no way of directly benefiting until now,” Norbury says.
“And with about one in six people currently living in social housing we see an enormous opportunity to help people to lower their energy bills and reduce their carbon emissions, making solar more useful and affordable for the many, not the few.”
SolShare takes the power generated from a single rooftop solar system and delivers the energy directly to each household within the building, ensuring all residents get a fair share by a predetermined allocation.
This is done ‘behind the meter’ – where energy is generated and consumed in the same place – meaning residents maintain their choice of energy provider and no external changes are needed by suppliers or network providers.
In many large apartment complexes, solar energy powers just the common areas while tenants still foot their full electricity bill. SolShare’s algorithm ensures solar energy consumption is maximised on site before any energy is fed back to the grid.
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