Allume’s SolShare, which connects one shared rooftop solar system to multiple apartments and is helping close the solar divide between freestanding homes and apartment residents, has won the Australian Good Design Award of the Year and the Good Design Award for Sustainability at the 2026 Australian Good Design Awards. The ceremony was held in Sydney on 9 October 2026. It is the first time in the awards’ history that the jury has chosen the same project for both honours.
At the Awards, SolShare also took home Best in Discipline and Best in Class in Product: Hardware & Building, and Gold in Product Design: Commercial & Industrial.
A problem that’s easy to describe but hard to solve
Rooftop solar has reached world-leading levels on Australian homes, but many of the more than 2.5 million Australians who live in apartments have been left out. Stella Knorr, Allume’s Chief Product Officer, said solving this meant looking beyond the technology itself.
“The problem was really simple to describe, but incredibly difficult to solve: people living in apartments were largely missing out on rooftop solar,” Knorr said.
“We saw an opportunity to remove that complexity and let residents keep their existing meter and electricity retailer while still receiving solar directly and even more efficiently from a shared rooftop system.”
SolShare is smart hardware that works “behind the meter”, meaning inside the building’s own electrical setup. It has now connected more than 13,000 apartments across Australia and the UK to rooftop solar, and has delivered more than 28GWh of solar energy.
SolShare also established a new category within the standards, the Inverter Power Sharing Device, which recognises it as its own product class rather than an existing solar product adapted for apartments.
A collaboration behind the product
SolShare 2, the second generation of Allume’s original SolShare tech released in 2019, was developed with Trike, a Melbourne-based product design and engineering studio. Trike contributed industrial design and mechanical engineering support across the full development cycle, from initial product research through to manufacturing optimisation. It worked alongside Allume’s team on design for manufacture, prototype iterations and standards compliance as the product was prepared for high-volume production.
“It was a privilege to support a program with this much purpose behind it,” said Luke Martin, Head of Innovation and Strategy, Trike.
Knorr said Trike became an extension of the Allume team. “Taking a complex hardware product to global markets takes a great team, and Trike was an invaluable part of ours. Their industrial design and mechanical engineering expertise helped us solve complex challenges while keeping user experience and manufacturability front and centre.”
Why it matters
Knorr said the project’s lesson is that impact comes from designing the whole system, not just the device. “The technology can be brilliant, but if it’s too difficult to install, commission, finance, maintain or understand, it won’t achieve scale.”
“For SolShare, that has meant thinking about installers, residents, housing providers, governments and building asset managers alongside the hardware itself. The result is something that has grown from a world-first technology into a repeatable infrastructure product being deployed across multiple markets.”
The jury recognised SolShare for its real-time system for sharing solar between apartments and for making renewable energy accessible to communities that have historically been excluded from rooftop solar. The Awards, established in 1958, are Australia’s longest-running international design awards.
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About Allume
Founded in Melbourne, and with a presence in the UK since 2021, Allume’s vision is a world where everyone can access clean, affordable energy from the sun. Allume launched SolShare in 2019, the world’s first and only technology that fairly shares solar energy from a single rooftop array across multiple apartments in the same building, removing the need for a separate system per home. Designed and manufactured in Australia, SolShare has delivered the benefits of solar to over 13,000 apartments across two continents, supported by SolCentre, Allume’s monitoring platform that provides a single view of every connected home.
Media Contact: Ali Lowe – Ali.lowe@allumeenergy.com.au Website: https://allumeenergy.com/en-au/solshare
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