From My Wardrobe To A Million Quotes: What’s Changed (And What Hasn’t)

This week SolarQuotes ticked over one million quote requests. Somewhere in a database is customer number one¹, and somewhere in the queue right now is customer number one million.

I thought it’d be a good excuse to look back. Some things about solar in Australia have changed almost beyond recognition. Other things haven’t budged an inch. Here’s five of each.

Five Things That Have Changed

1. The Office

SolarQuotes started in my walk-in wardrobe, in a rental in Adelaide. These days we’ve got an actual office in the Adelaide CBD.

2. The Price Of A Solar Panel

Back in 2009 the global average price for a solar module was around US$2.18 a watt. By late 2025, module prices had crashed to under US$0.10 a watt in some markets. That’s A 95% fall.

3. The Price Of Storage

There was barely a home battery market in 2009. Tesla’s Powerwall didn’t exist until 2015, so anyone storing solar back then was doing it with lead-acid batteries. BloombergNEF’s data shows lithium-ion battery packs averaged well over $1,200/kWh in 2010. Their most recent survey has that down to $108/kWh globally, and stationary storage specifically down to just $70/kWh.

4. The Renewables Mix

In 2009, renewables made up about 5% of Australia’s electricity generation. The National Electricity Market just hit a new quarterly record of 42.1% renewables in Q2 2026. Coal’s gone from supplying the vast majority of the grid to under half.

5. Number Of Solar Installs

When I started this site, there were just over 14,000 solar PV systems connected to the grid across the whole country. By the end of November 2025, that number had passed 4.62 million. There are now more rooftop solar systems in Australia than there are Australians in most cities.

Five Things That Haven’t Changed

1. One Solar Panel Brand

I dug out a photo of an Australian solar wholesaler’s brand board from 2009. Of the panel manufacturers on it, none are still selling in Australia the way they were then. BP Solar, Sharp, Sanyo, Evergreen, Schott, Kyocera, Mitsubishi, GE, Conergy, all gone. Suntech and SunPower both went bankrupt and got picked up by new owners, so what’s selling under those names today isn’t really the same company. Yingli Solar was delisted from the NYSE in 2018, and came within a whisker of full liquidation in 2020. Trina Solar is the one panel brand from that era I could confirm was already supplying Australia in 2009 and is still trading here largely unchanged – we still recommend it.

2. One Grid Connect Solar Inverter Brand

On the inverter board Fronius is the only brand I can think of still going strong for on-grid in Australia. Selectronic, Victron Energy and Outback Power Systems are all still around for off-grid. SMA’s still here but pulled out of residential.

Am I missing anyone? Genuinely curious if there’s a brand from the early days still trading here that I’ve overlooked.

3. Our First Two Clients

Adelaide Solar Systems (under new owners now) and Solar Wholesalers (still with the same owners) are both still going, and still among the installers I’d point an Adelaide homeowner toward today. Without Paul from Adelaide Solar and Andy from Solar Wholesalers agreeing to be guinea pigs for a bloke running a comparison site out of his wardrobe, there’d be no SolarQuotes.

4. Staff Turnover Of Zero

In 2009 it was me, Chantel and John doing IT. John is still running the show IT-wise. In seventeen years, not one person we’ve hired as a full-time employee has decided to leave the business, aside from Rino, who retired this year after a long run. We’ve built this place on truth-telling, strict vetting of installers, and free personal support for anyone electrifying their home, and the fact that the same people are still here, upholding that seventeen years on, says something about how seriously we take it.

5. None Of This Happens Without The Installers

All of the above is nothing without the people who climb on your roof. Installing solar is a genuinely tough job. You’re up on a hot tin roof in a heatwave, and/or hauling 150kg batteries into place, opening up switchboards that might have asbestos, or snakes in them, working around voltages that don’t forgive mistakes. And they’re doing it while competing against mobs who don’t understand, or don’t care about, the idea of a sustainable margin.

They stick at it anyway. Because at the end of the day, it’s their work that gets you a system that actually holds up, keeps your bills down, and might just keep the lights on when the grid doesn’t. All SolarQuotes really does is shine a light on the good ones.

A million people registering with a website is a nice stat, but the real wonder is the hundreds of thousands of installs, done by the sparkies, apprentices and small business owners who built this revolution with their own hands.

Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column by SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock. Subscribe to SolarQuotes’ free newsletter to get it emailed to your inbox each week along with our other home electrification coverage.