Riding the solar coaster: Tindo’s push for Australian-made power

We call the solar PV industry the Solar Coaster because anyone who’s been in the business long enough, as I have, starts to see history repeat. Solar PV installations peaked in 2021 and 2022, and while we’re not quite at those levels right now, the new drivers are larger systems and battery storage.

We make solar panels but in South Australia Tindo also offers an installation service. So, we see the trend of our average panel installation growing to 10.4KW, and the average battery installation now at 20KW/h. We’ve always had a high battery attachment rate in our installations – around 70 percent even before the battery subsidy kicked in – because we take a consultative approach to create the best solution in the market. Now we attach batteries to 100 per cent of our solar panel installations. We’re not selling a system without a battery.

Tindo will be celebrating 15 years of manufacturing next year and we’re continuing to adjust to the new dynamics and attempting to help put Australia in greater control of its own energy future. In August we received a $34.5 million package from the federal government, to assist us in expanding our production scale and align our prices with a larger addressable market.

Under the package – part of the Solar Sunshot program administered by ARENA – we’ll grow our capacity to 180MW of panels per annum, which will see new equipment and processes added to our production line, as well as an additional 50 employees. Included in the funding package is budget for a third-party feasibility study into a Tindo Gigafactory.

The Gigafactory will produce 1000MW of high-quality solar panels each year, meaning Australia will have between a fifth and a quarter of its annual rooftop solar panel requirements made domestically. It will be an important step for this country because it gives Australia a sovereign capacity to make equipment for our energy system, it creates an economic case for Australian industry to become part of the solar PV supply chain and it also gives an incentive for our resources industry to refine and value-add their extractive products for use in a growing domestic industry.

I don’t want to make it sound as if this is an easy industry with a straight-forward future. It’s not easy or straight-forward. At Tindo we are a small Australian player in a massive global industry, and we constantly battle against low-price imported panels that come from massive overseas factories. But we also balance that situation with the fact that the mega-industries that produce the panels also make and export high-quality, reasonably priced components that we integrate in our panels.

How do we stay in business against manufacturers with massive scale and government support? We have to offer a compelling proposition, and ours is performance, durability and a product that is built for the Australian environment.

We’ve had our panels assessed by third party organisations, and we come out on top. The Desert Knowledge Australia Solar Centre in Alice Springs shows our panels outperforming every other panel, and we’re sticking to and exceeding our nameplate generation over an extended period of time.

We’ve made reliable power-output part of our warranty and that’s something that CHOICE recognised in their product review of solar panels at the end of 2024. CHOICE reviewed 54 solar panels in a random test so none of the manufacturers could provide a ‘gold plated’ sample. Of the 18 manufacturers, there was only one panel that actually met or exceeded the labelled power class – Tindo’s. Every other panel flashed under label, which is pretty sad for the industry because it means customers aren’t getting what they pay for. To give some context, the Tindo panel (410W Karra) scored an overall 92% product rating from CHOICE and the second-placed panel managed a score of 80%.

Given this quality context, you can see why I’d always argue that a Tindo panel is not ‘high-priced’ – it’s actually the cheapest source of power taken over time. You get the power output you paid for, and you get reliable performance under the extremes of the Australian climate. So, we can say that over time a Tindo panel will be the best value for money.

We stand by our quality with a 25-year product warranty, and we’ve just launched a $1000 Worry Free warranty; if anything goes wrong with a Tindo solar panel bought after 1 November 2025, we pay the owner $1000, on top of the replacement under warranty. Tindo panels are also cyclone-rated making them sought-after in Northern Australia and Southeast Asia, and our panels are so good that if an owner decommissions their system, we take back the panels, test them and repurpose them in developing nations that need renewable energy but don’t have large budgets.

One of the questions we get at Tindo is how we can build such a high-quality panel if the components come from China? The answer is we use some components from China, and also from around the world, so long as they are the best components for our panels. The price of Tindo panels is not due to the labour cost – Australian workers are highly efficient and productive and they work in a fully automated production line. Our biggest expense is our bill of materials, because we always keep quality high.

Our manufacturing facility at Mawson Lakes is as advanced and as automated as any plant in China. What we do differently is we wrap-around Australian know-how, in design and engineering, and also in the quality control process. We’re an Australian business so we stand by what we make.

Tindo has been making panels since 2011 and we’re proud to be creating sovereign capability to build our future energy system. Along with capability is the IP and the know-how and the skilled people who work for us; these are amazingly intelligent people, coming out of universities in Australia, and if it wasn’t for us, they’d have to take a job overseas.

In the end, we can build a factory and produce a panel but it’s the niche skills and the advanced education that builds the solar PV industry and ensures we operate at the cutting edge. This is where the future lies for Australia, in my opinion, and the Mawson Lakes expansion creates the scale and economic multiplier in associated industries, that strengthens Australia’s intellectual base.

There’s always more to be done in the renewables sector. The good news for now is that the Australian solar industry is in expansion mode and we have the support of the government and of Australian consumers.

Glenn Morelli is the Director and Owner of Tindo

This is a paid sponsored article brought to you by Tindo Solar.