The Australian residential solar market has a trust problem.
Over the last fifteen years, more than 700 solar retailers have gone out of business across the country, according to the long-running list of failed installers that SolarQuotes has maintained since 2011. Industry estimates now put the proportion of Australian rooftops whose installer no longer trades at roughly one in six. Those systems still work, mostly. They also have no-one obliged to answer a warranty call when the inverter throws a fault on a Saturday afternoon.
The 2026 federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program, live since 1 July 2025, is pulling a new cohort of Australian households into the battery category at precisely the moment the warranty layer underneath them is the thinnest it has ever been. That is not a happy combination.
The 1-in-6 number, read carefully
The 1-in-6 figure is useful because it names the problem in a way a homeowner can act on. A retailer does not have to be a bad operator to disappear. The Australian solar market has turned over faster than the warranty durations it sells: a panel sold in 2016 with a 10-year product warranty and a 25-year performance warranty was sold against a business that needed only to fail in 2022 for the warranty to mean less in practice than it does on paper.
The Clean Energy Council’s accreditation has lifted installer quality materially since its 2019 reset, now folded into the Solar Accreditation Australia (SAA) regime that replaced it in 2024. But accreditation is a point-in-time credential. It does not guarantee that the retailer holding it will still be trading in five years’ time.
The practical consequence, for a homeowner pricing a system in 2026, is that the most important decision is often not the brand of the panel or the make of the inverter. It is which of the installers on the quote page is likely to still exist in 2030.
Why Solar’s model
Why Solar, a Sydney-based operation covering more than 2,800 postcodes, has built its model on that one question. The platform is independent of any installer; its revenue comes from installer partnerships and leads, not from the homeowner. What it sells to the homeowner, in effect, is vetting.
Specifically, the platform only passes a homeowner’s enquiry to SAA-accredited installers with a track record the platform has independently checked. It maintains guides, calculators and rebate-assessment tools on its own site; it does not sell over the phone; its marketing language is unusually explicit about what it will not do (“no pressure, no sales calls”).
That positioning is not unique in the broader advice economy, but it is unusual in Australian residential solar, where the dominant consumer experience has been a high-pressure quote sequence in which the homeowner often cannot tell whether the installer quoting is one of the good ones.
One in six Australian solar systems now carries a warranty against a business that no longer trades. That is a trust problem, not an accreditation problem.
What independent advice is worth now
The Cheaper Home Batteries Program, costed at $2.3 billion in the March 2025 federal budget, discounts the installed cost of a battery system by roughly 30 per cent (around $330 per usable kilowatt-hour in 2025, stepping down annually to 2030). Most states stack their own incentives on top: the NSW Peak Demand Reduction Scheme battery incentive, Victoria’s Solar Homes interest-free battery loan of up to $8,800, and Western Australia’s Residential Battery Scheme.
The effect, for a homeowner pricing a combined solar-plus-battery system in 2026, is that the subsidy stack is the largest it has ever been. Battery attachment rates on new solar installs jumped from roughly 7 per cent to above 20 per cent in the second half of 2025, after the federal program began.
A more subsidised market is also a market where installer quality matters more, not less. A bad install on a subsidised system still produces a bad install, and the homeowner’s comeback against the installer’s accreditation body for a botched job is still imperfect.
The platform’s specific trade-off
I spoke with Why Solar’s team about the economics of running a vetting-first platform in a market that rewards volume. Their answer was straightforward. The 2023-24 wave of retailer collapses was correlated with the same set of visible behaviours: aggressive outbound marketing, one-day installs on complex roofs, compressed margins on the install itself. Excluding those operators costs the platform a portion of its throughput. It also reduces the proportion of jobs that end in a warranty dispute in year three.
“The question we keep asking,” a representative said, “is whether a customer who installs through us in 2026 still has a working system and a reachable installer in 2032. If we can answer yes to that question for nine out of ten of our customers, the platform has done its job.”
That is a narrower claim than the industry has been making for fifteen years. It is also, on the evidence of the installer-collapse data, the claim that most matters.
The wider point
The residential energy upgrade wave Australia is in the middle of will move tens of billions of dollars of consumer capital over the next five years. The mechanism by which that capital is deployed, a homeowner weighing three quotes, a salesperson pointing at a panel brand, a subsidy stacked through an accredited retailer, has not kept up with the scale of the deployment.
The operators who will matter in the second half of this decade are the ones, like Why Solar, whose business model makes installer-collapse a commercial problem for them rather than for the homeowner.
That is an alignment of incentives the Australian solar market has needed for some time.