Vale Michael Bloch

Michael Bloch, SolarQuotes’ most prolific writer, died last week after a long illness.

Michael joined SolarQuotes in April 2017 and went on to write an extraordinary 3,363 posts over almost nine years. His final article was published on 22 January 2026. That volume alone is remarkable, but it only hints at the impact he had.

How Michael Built A Legacy

Michael’s path into solar and publishing was not a smooth one. After hitting a very hard patch in life, what changed his course was something simple and easily missed. A computer in a public library. That computer was connected to a strange new thing called the internet.

Sitting there, Michael taught himself HTML. He built a website around something he had cared about for decades: looking after the environment.  That site led to work at a Melbourne company called Energy Matters.

At the time, in the early 2000s, Energy Matters, a fledgling solar installation business, needed help building a website. Michael was central to building it, shaping not just the words on the page but how the whole thing worked. Almost all of the company’s sales eventually came through the site Michael built, propelling the company to become a pioneer of solar retailing in Australia. In fact, Energy Matters helped launch the careers of many people who went on to build the Australian solar industry as we know it today. None of that happens without the website Michael built, using skills learned quietly in a public library.

In the mid-2010s, Energy Matters was sold to a large American company. The business changed, and not for the better. Around that time, Michael and I met, and he came to work for SolarQuotes.

When Michael joined, SolarQuotes was struggling for visibility in the search results. Michael fixed that. Part of the answer was simple and relentless. Straight news posts on the blog. Every weekday. Every year. Including public holidays and Christmas Day. No clickbait. No fluff. Just clear facts written for people who wanted to understand what was going on.

What most readers never saw was the work Michael did behind the scenes. The structure, the discipline, the quiet technical work that made sure our information reached the people who needed it. Without Michael, SolarQuotes would almost certainly be a much smaller and less useful site.

A Supportive Friend And Colleague

Those who worked closely with Michael knew his dry humour and his kindness. He noticed effort in others and gave praise quietly, often with nothing more than a short message and a few numbers showing a piece of work had landed well. It meant more than applause.

He also cared about tone. He reminded us that talking to readers should be calm, useful, and focused on the issue, not the person. SolarQuotes’ in-house installer Anthony Bennett summed it up simply: Michael offered a north star.

“We lost a good soldier last week. A bloke who should be celebrated more than he will be, but that’s fine because he’s not the sort who ever wanted a fuss made. In the war against hyperbole, marketing spin and energy transition disinformation, there were few better and certainty none more productive. Since 2017 Michael has been listening to the wind, gauging the sunshine, perusing the press releases and then cutting through the bullshit; to bring us news about energy, electrification, technology and policy. Third article in and he was already sticking it to the gas industry. Bless. I’m pretty sure he’d reject the notion, but we really owe him a debt of gratitude. And I don’t mean the royal we of SolarQuotes, rather it’s everyone who’s ever read an article here. Michael helped shape the web presence that made the site such a roaring success,” Anthony says of Michael.

Some of the SolarQuotes team at Michael’s service in Gawler.

Quietly Working To Change The World

Michael lived with cancer for some time. He took time away from work, then returned, glad to have something to keep him occupied. Even then, he continued doing a huge amount of unseen maintenance across the site, fixing, updating, and keeping things running.

Michael never wanted attention. He was private, modest, and happiest working in the background. He believed deeply in improving the environment, and he saw good information as a practical way to make that happen. Through his writing and his unseen work, he helped thousands of households move to solar. In doing so, he achieved exactly what he cared about.

He succeeded far beyond what most people ever know.

Michael will be deeply missed.