'Amazing piece of technology': solar ‘traffic controller’ for apartments takes top Australian design award

On 10 October, 2026, SolShare had a historic double victory at the Good Design Awards, the country’s top honour for design, which celebrates the most groundbreaking projects from around Australia.

Allume’s SolShare won both the Australian Good Design Award of the Year and the Good Design Award for Sustainability - the first time one project has ever won both awards. We also shared Best in Discipline for Product Design. The Guardian reports that we were selected from more than 1,000 entries from Australia and overseas, across 13 design disciplines and more than 30 categories.

Good Design Australia: the full story behind the win

Good Design Australia published a detailed feature on the win, and it’s the best place to see the design thinking behind SolShare. A few highlights:

• A world-first category. Our world-first technology established the Inverter Power Sharing Device category within the standards, recognising a new class of equipment built for shared rooftop solar.
• Real scale. SolShare now connects more than 13,000 apartments across Australia and the UK, and has delivered more than 28GWh of solar energy.
• Real savings. Residents typically see bill savings of roughly 30 to 40 per cent.
• Design for the whole system. Our Chief Product Officer, Stella Knorr, said impact comes from “designing the whole system, not just the device”. That means thinking about installers, residents, housing providers and building managers from the start.
• Built to last. SolShare is manufactured locally in Melbourne, and the modular design means components can be serviced or replaced instead of discarding the whole system.

Our partner on SolShare was Melbourne industrial design and product engineering specialist, Trike.

Read the feature at Good Design Australia →

The Guardian: “a traffic controller for solar”

The Guardian described SolShare as an unassuming white box that works like a “traffic controller for solar”. It splits power from one rooftop system between several apartments, without multiple installations, individual inverters or messy wiring.

Good Design Australia chair Dr Brandon Gien called SolShare “an amazing piece of technology” and a beautifully designed solution to a complex problem. He also said it already delivers benefits at significant scale for the millions of Australians who live in apartments.

The Guardian pointed to the company we’re now keeping, too. Past winners of the top award include the Cochlear hearing implant and the Flow Hive beehive.

Read the story at The Guardian →

ABC Radio National: our CEO on Saturday Extra

Our CEO and co-founder, Cameron Knox, joined ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra on 10/10/2026 for a 10-minute conversation about the win. The segment covers how Australian-made SolShare is already being exported globally.

Listen to the segment at ABC listen →

The Canberra Times: “a problem no one has solved”

Reporting from AAP, The Canberra Times quoted Dr Gien, who explained why the judges were so impressed. He said we’d “solved a problem that no one has managed to solve to date”, and done it through clever, intuitive design.

Read the story at The Canberra Times →

ESD News: two major honours

ESD News covered the awards ceremony in Sydney, noting that the Good Design Awards, established in 1958, are Australia’s longest-running international design awards program, recognising projects across energy, healthcare, artificial intelligence, climate resilience, public policy and biodiversity.

Dr Brandon Gien said great design starts with “deeply understanding a problem and finding a better way to solve it”, and SolShare does exactly that by directing solar energy to each apartment based on what it needs at that moment. Dr Gien also said “the quality of this year’s Award winners is exceptional”, which makes the result mean even more to us.

Read the story at ESD News →