Victoria-headquartered developer of SolShare, Allume Energy has received $3.8 million (USD 2.4 million) in funding through the Australian government’s Industry Growth Program (IGP) to help scale the manufacture of its technology in Melbourne.
SolShare technology enables multiple apartments to share energy received from a single rooftop solar system.
Allume Energy Chief Executive and Co-Founder Cameron Knox said with with demand soaring, the funding will allow Allume to rapidly scale up manufacturing at its Dandenong facility, in partnership with SRX Global.
Sydney-headquartered SRX Global is an electronic manufacturing facility with branches in Melbourne, Malaysia and Singapore.
Federal Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic said SolShare addresses the barriers to solar adoption in apartments.
“It’s been hard to work out who gets to install the solar panels on an apartment block and then who gets that power, until now,” Husic said.
“Melbourne’s Allume Energy solved this with a technology solution helping to finally share a single rooftop solar system, so apartment dwellers cut their power bill costs.”
SolShare’s behind-the-meter smart hardware physically divides alternating current (AC), from grid-connected inverter as part of rooftop single system, to multiple loads, such as apartments, providing a parallel supply.
As the electricity is shared downstream of an apartment’s retail electricity meter, and SolShare monitors each apartments power draw from the grid to inform the dynamic distribution of AC energy among the connected apartments.
The technology’s dynamic sharing algorithm instantaneously directs the supplied power to optimise where and when to send the energy in the building, ensuring each unit gets the right amount of energy.
Energy distribution can be in equal share, or varying allocations according to each apartment’s size, and can also be sent to common areas.
The software also ensures solar energy consumption is maximised and as little as possible is fed back into the grid.
