Commercial · Industrial · Instrumentation
A thousand-dollar month is twelve grand a year — every year, rising every year, and none of it comes back. Commercial solar turns the biggest line on your bill into plant you own.
Business runs in daylight. That is the whole argument. Your load peaks at the same hours your roof generates, so you use what you make instead of selling it back for pennies.
After a system for your house? Residential solar and battery pricing is published here →
A house uses most of its power after dark, which is why homes need batteries to make solar pay. A business does not. Lights, compressors, ovens, racks, chillers, air-conditioning — they all run through the middle of the day, the same hours the roof is producing.
That changes the arithmetic completely. Instead of exporting your surplus for a few cents, you consume what you generate and simply stop buying it. Every unit you use yourself is worth what you currently pay for power, not the handful of cents a retailer pays you for it.
It also means the system pays for itself on generation alone — no battery needed to make the numbers work. If you trade after dark, wear demand charges, or run something that cannot go down, we will price storage alongside it and show you both.
We size it against twelve months of your real consumption. Not an average, not a rule of thumb, and not the biggest system we can fit on the roof.
The business case
Power is one of the few overheads you can permanently reduce without cutting anything or anyone. Sized to your daytime load, a system takes a chunk out of the usage side of your bill from the first sunny day — and keeps doing it for twenty-odd years while the tariff climbs around it.
Solar on a commercial premises is plant used to produce income. Depending on your turnover and the write-off threshold in the year you buy, it is either written off up front or depreciated — and if you are registered for GST you claim the GST back, so your real cost is the ex-GST number. We are electricians, not accountants: have yours confirm which applies before you sign.
Unlike most fit-out spend, solar does not walk out the door when a tenant does. It is fixed plant bolted to the asset, still producing for whoever is in the building in fifteen years.
Landlords & commercial property
It is the standard commercial problem. Your tenant pays for power, so on paper solar saves you nothing. Stop looking at it as an energy decision and look at it as a leasing one.
A solar-equipped tenancy is cheaper to occupy. That is a real advantage when someone is comparing your building against the one down the road, and a real reason for a good tenant to renew instead of move. It lowers their cost of occupancy without you lowering the rent — which is not something many building upgrades can claim.
Depending on how your lease is written, the capital cost may also be recoverable through outgoings, and larger tenants increasingly expect a building to show it is doing something about energy. Both are worth a conversation with your agent and your accountant before you commit.
We are happy to quote a building on the assumption you will never see a power bill from it. The case still stacks up. It is just a different case, and we will put it to you that way rather than pretending the savings are yours.
Before BD NRG
Commercial is not a side of the business we grew into from house work. I was Electrical Superintendent on two utility-scale solar farm builds for EPC contractor Monford Group.
100 MW
Queensland
260 MW
New South Wales, near Albury
Responsible for
The complete electrical installation on both builds.
Bundaberg during construction. Same trade as your switchboard — a few hundred thousand panels bigger.
What we take on
Twenty-plus years across residential, commercial, industrial and instrumentation. The same licence covers a shop fit-out and a process control panel, and the bloke who quotes it is the bloke who does it.
Tenancy fit-outs, refurbs and strip-outs. We work around your trading hours, not the other way round.
Three-phase distribution, motor control, machinery connection and high-bay lighting.
PLC programming, SCADA and process control — the part most electrical contractors sub out.
High-bay and office retrofits, with emergency and exit compliance certified on completion.
Main switchboard upgrades, supply upgrades and the Energex paperwork that goes with them.
Commercial solar, backup where you cannot afford to go dark, and workplace EV charging.
Get a price
No showroom, no sales rep, no brochure pack. Send twelve months of bills and a photo of your switchboard and we will come back with a fixed price, what it takes off your usage, and how long it takes to pay for itself — and we will tell you straight if the answer is that it doesn’t.