Allume’s upscaled manufacturing of SolShare to stay in Australia

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Victoria-headquartered technology company Allume Energy’s rooftop solar Solshare apartment building energy management system will use a $3.8 million (USD 2.3 million) federal government industry growth program grant to scale-up its manufacturing plant and processes in Melbourne.

Allume Energy Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Cameron Knox.

Image: Allume Energy

Allume Energy Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Cameron Knox told pv magazine the benefits to do so far outweigh the drawbacks, including on cost and supply chain evolution, and is a good fit for future export demand, having already rolled out its product to the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK).

The Solshare system is supplied power by a grid-connected inverter as part of a rooftop solar system and delivers AC energy from this shared power source downstream of an apartments’ retail electricity meter, and monitors each apartment’s power draw from the grid, to inform the dynamic distribution of AC energy among the connected apartments.

Knox said Solshare is designed and largely deployed in Melbourne, and as Australia is at the leading edge of renewable energy adoption and consequently a nursery for new business models, “it doesn’t make any sense for Allume not to build our product here”.

Pv magazine: Why is Allume choosing to upscale its manufacturing in Australia?

Cameron Knox: We think it’s the right one for our country in order to become a renewable energy superpower not just in delivery of renewable energy projects but also in the upstream manufacturing of the particular minerals.

More importantly, we’ve got the expertise here in renewable energy industries, we just historically haven’t capitalised on that, but could, just by being a world leader in rooftop solar adoption, so we really feel like here is the place for us to build our product.

PV: What are the benefits of manufacturing in Melbourne?

Knox: Any drawbacks are far outweighed by the benefits you get from having your research development team close to your manufacturing line and as a result being able to understand the manufacturing process well, to unblock bottlenecks, to streamline the process; you can have a greater impact on your cost than you could by just shifting to a low-cost region.

That proximity is important for our business, and it means we’ve created a high-quality product as we continue to refine things.

Also, a lot of materials are from Australia and many just in Victoria, even our sheet metals, our cabling is from Victoria, our printed circuit board assembly is manufactured in Victoria at SRX, which is at the same facility as we assemble our products.

We’re increasing the amount of our components on printed circuit boards as part of this manufacturing scale up to automate the assembly process, so, that will actually increase the amount of our subassemblies that we’re able to fabricate in our current manufacturing facility.

So, not just the end product but also subassemblies will be made in Melbourne and again that enables that understanding of the design for manufacture, the ability to make changes and build a really streamlined process and high-quality product and operational system that surrounds that product as well.

Cameron Knox with Federal Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic at the Allume manufacturing plant.

Image: Allume Energy

PV: How will the industry growth program (IGP) grant enable Allume?

Knox: It enables us to do a step change in reducing our assembly time and automating what we call our sub-assembly fabrication. So, our current Solshare takes a bit over a day for one person to put together, but this could be done in less than an hour with the development this funding enables, so it can dramatically increase the scalability of that manufacturing process.

As a result, the labour cost, which really is the only drawback of manufacturing in Australia, will be dramatically reduced while maintaining all the benefits that come with a domestic manufacturing strategy.

PV: What will the impact of manufacturing SolShare in Melbourne have on your supply chain?

Knox: A big change enabled by this grant is to improve the robustness of our supply chain, so we’ve been manufacturing at a relatively low volume to date and that’s meant we’ve been able to manage a supply chain that does have some components that are very specialist, and we lean on particular manufacturers for.

This funding enables us to make some changes to increase the robustness so that we won’t get held up by a particular product going obsolete or a particular manufacturer changing hands or hopefully not having another pandemic; external factors that can really have a huge impact on your ability to build product. We will be in a much better position to absorb those with the funding.

PV: How does SolShare work?

Knox: Each Solshare device connects 15 apartments to one solar system and most of our projects are more than 15 apartments so you just have multiple SolShares, there’s no technical limit on the number of apartments that can be connected.

The limitation comes on the roof space versus the number of apartments, so a twenty-storey building won’t have enormous roof space compared to the amount of energy used by the apartments.

That’s very different to a five-storey building where you do have a plenty of workspace and across the world the apartment market is really skewed towards smaller, low-rise buildings so there’s a huge number of apartments that are in the two to five-storey building space, that have the roof area for solar.

That’s the building type our product is designed for, and obviously as cells become more efficient, modules may get smaller.

PV: What’s the potential market share for SolShare?

Knox: In Australia, the number of people living in low-to-medium rise apartments is around 2 million (2021 Census), while Allume’s data says 15 million Americans and 300 million Europeans are apartment dwellers.

We’re not even scratching the surface on the amount of people who need access to solar in apartments so we’re very excited to be deepening that scratch and making a bigger and bigger impact over time.

We are really thinking ambitiously about the impact that we can have at a global scale. We’ve built the product and all these processes to support that, to really scale to meet that demand because bewilderingly there’s really no one else in the market globally who’s built a product to enable a single rooftop solar system to be shared by multiple apartments.

That’s a huge opportunity that presents itself for us and we can do that. We also feel like we have the responsibility to do that and solve that problem and then offer it to everyone who wants it on a global scale.

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