Adelaide-based company literally making hay while the sun shines

AUSTRALIA’S only solar panel maker wants to spark a revolution in local manufacturing and believes Covid-19 has added fuel to their fire.

Tindo Solar, at Mawson Lakes in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, is expanding into a new factory and $6m production line.

Chief executive Shayne

Jaenisch said the company had outgrown its original premises after a decade and took “the opportunity to buy the block next door”.

The move has more than doubled production capacity from a total annual output of 65 megawatts to 150 megawatts. The production line is expected to be fully operational by December and manufacturing by January. In the meantime the company is still selling panels that were made in the original factory. “The biggest panel that we could make on the old line was a 400 watt panel,” Mr Jaenisch said.

“And our smallest panel on the new line will be a 400 watt panel. Our largest panel will be a 540 watt panel.”

While bigger is not always better, especially when it comes to rooftop solar, the larger panels open access to a new lucrative market in large-scale systems such as solar farms.

Mr Jaenisch witnessed a big boost in consumer demand for Australian-made products, including solar panels, after the advent of Covid-19.

In his first three years at the helm, he said, about 60 companies around Australia had made contact “wanting to buy our panels”.

Since Covid-19 that number jumped to 1000. “We had consumers contacting us from all over Australia, saying that they want to buy Australian-made,” he said. “We’ve had record sales.”

Now Mr Jaenisch wants to foster a network of local suppliers, so that every component of the solar panel system is made in Australia.

“Covid has taught us all a valuable lesson, that we are too reliant on overseas imports, especially from China,” he said.

“We want to bring back more manufacturing, not just solar panels but the upstream manufacturing of everything from our glass to our cells to our frame.

“It’s like when we had a car industry, there was only one or two car manufacturers but that upstream manufacturing, for everything from the components, to the seats, to the wheels (was made in Australia).

“We’re pushing for the upstream manufacturing to come back, so that we can have sovereignty and so that we have the ability to employ more Australians and be less reliant on overseas.

“We’ve got all the raw materials here, we should be making everything that goes into a solar panel.”

In a decade, Tindo Solar had produced more than 284,000 solar panels, an equivalent 82.5 megawatts of solar modules, becoming one of the largest creators of Small-scale Technology Certificates.

The panels are sold locally or exported to Vietnam.

About 10,000 panels were exported to Vietnam in the past 18 months.