Solar Naturally sees demand spike from battery rebate

As Western Australia's largest solar installer and the fourth-largest in the country with offices also in Sydney and Brisbane, Solar Naturally has capitalised on the rebate which gives households, businesses an community organisations a discount of around 30 per cent on the upfront cost of installing small-scale battery stems.

"For those first three months from July to September we did an unbelievable amount of batteries," says Bak, who won the inaugural 2025 Australian Young Entrepreneur Award in the Energy & Cleantech category. 

We had to find a way with our sales teams to reengineer the product. People were either replacing a lot of old systems that were defunct or weren’t working as well, and replacing or upgrading with newer technology which integrated solar back with the battery."

"At the moment across the capital cities we’re doing 700-800 batteries each month. We’re doing mid-40s to $50 million in revenue, and we actually think that we might blow $80-90 million in revenue this year."

He says around 50 per cent of installations now are for standalone batteries, often servicing customers that have been waiting for the opportunity and confidence in the safety of batteries, and have been incentivised by the new government program.

"A lot of our repeat customers are coming back that already have solar with us – they are loyal customers because we've done right by them the first time around and they're not going shopping anywhere else," he adds.

This sudden surge harks back to the origins of Solar Naturally in 2008 when Bak was just 21 years' old, having finally achieved his childhood dream of gaining a commercial pilot's licence only to find that airlines were laying off pilots and weren't hiring due to the economic headwinds of the global financial crisis (GFC).

"The job market collapsed pretty well overnight, so I just needed to find a way to pivot," the entrepreneur tells Business News Australia.

Like so many founder stories Bak found opportunity through personal experience, as at the time his father was installing solar on his house with rebates that were new at the time. The installer was a company from Sydney, and Bak wondered why a Perth-based company wasn't doing it.

"It didn’t make sense," he says.

"Perth had only a handful of solar retailers, yet government rebates made the numbers impossible to ignore. I backed myself, swapped the cockpit for entrepreneurship, and launched Solar Naturally.

"What started as a survival move has grown into one of Australia’s largest and longest standing solar companies, powering over 60,000 homes and helping Australians take control of their energy future."

When it began Bak "didn't have a clue how to install solar" and says it was "a bit of a maze" to find the right product and people to work with.

"I had to go and look for contractors to install the product as well and leverage their expertise, and talk about what worked and what couldn’t work, how do you design the roof, how do you design inverters, and more technical stuff that I didn’t get," he remembers.

In pursuit of higher quality customer experiences and responsiveness to their needs, after two years the critical decision was made to switch from a contractor model to an employee-based model.

"We we had a lot of challenges with contractors doing work that I wouldn’t want done to my house, and dealing with the ramifications and issues that came after it because something wasn’t done right or they damaged something," he says.

"They weren’t able to go back and service the customers in time because we didn’t have any technical people within the office, and that meant having to wait for someone.

"At that point we wanted to provide a holistic service for the customer where we know that the full start to finish process is handled internally - they're getting the service that they deserve. We needed to build the team to do it, and we could control their time slots."

He says the idea to expand Solar Naturally nationally was always on the cards, but Bak needed to wait until the right moment. In 2017, almost a decade after founding the business, the company made its first move to the East Coast market by setting up its Sydney office, and then Brisbane the following year.

Now employing more than 140 people, Solar Naturally has been mostly bootstrapped throughout its existence with the exception of some help from Bak's father at the beginning, as well as Richard Clamp who is now the company's technical director and business partner who contributed critical technical knowledge and expertise to the enterprise.

"We're trying to get to number one in the whole of Australia and are just building the platforms to be able to do that," he explains.

"We do still want to move into other markets and capitalise on places like Adelaide which has a huge amount of renewable energy in it," he says.

Bak says the hardest part about the business at the moment is recruitment, which for Solar Naturally is rooted in apprenticeships and a very minor contribution of importing talent given Australia only recognises accreditations from New Zealand.

"There's probably a small minority of people we see would be looking to stay on long-term in Australia and be willing to make that effort to redo everything all over again. We identify that, and we do sponsor some of these people and take them under our wing," he says.

He says Solar Naturally puts a lot of people through a four-year apprenticeship program, emphasising it takes a long time to nurture their skills.

"Solar is quite regulated. You've got to sit an exam to be solar accredited, and now you've got to set a course to be battery credited," he says.

"So it's quite a long process, and a lot of these courses cost upwards of $10,000-15,000 per person. That’s a lot of investment to put in for an electrician, and when you're doing it at the scale that we are there's always a lot of training involved."