Off the Solar Coaster with Celtic Solar
Working out the right time to go solar can feel like a wild ride. John Caruso discovers a local business designed to take the guesswork out of it.
Fifteen years ago, on a six thousand square metre block at Doonan, we installed our first solar system. Every quote came with an asterisk.
The feed-in tariff quoted on a Tuesday had shifted by the time the paperwork was signed on a Friday; rebates appeared and disappeared and the panels themselves were supposedly obsolete within eighteen months of anyone bolting them to a roof – or so every second salesman told me.
Nobody in the industry could give an answer that was still true six months later, and the same conversation played out again a few years on when batteries entered the picture, and everybody had a different opinion on whether they were worth the money.
Installers had a name for that chaos, and it’s still relevant today: the ‘solar coaster’. Between battery rebates, EVs and heat pumps replacing gas, the decisions have only multiplied, and the stakes of getting them wrong have only grown with the price tag.
Cameron Walker has spent the better part of two decades building a business to lift that standard, first as an electrician running his own company in Albury-Wodonga and now applying the same discipline to solar as owner of Celtic Solar in Noosaville.
Ask him why a customer should trust his crew over anyone else quoting the same job, and the answer comes down to four things: reliability, time in the market, experience, and the people that do the work. Reliability comes first, and it isn’t a sales line so much as a habit. Cameron recently talked a client out of a cut-price system based on the logic that the technology would be outdated within a decade. His response was to flip the question back on them: what if it isn’t?
“Then you’re the one ripping it out and starting again,” he says, while the neighbour is still running the system that was installed properly the first time.
A well-built setup, he argues, should run twenty five to thirty years without a second thought, which matters a great deal more to a homeowner in their sixties than any discount ever will. It’s the same argument he’d make to anyone still weighing up whether to wait for the next generation of panels before committing to this one.
Time in the market is the second thing, and Celtic Solar has more of it than most. Tony and Mel Morrissey built the business from 2010, installing systems for hundreds of local customers and earning a reputation that takes fifteen years to build and about a week to wreck.
Cameron and his wife, Chelsey, bought the business rather than starting one from scratch, and ruled out rebadging it. A name with that much goodwill attached is worth more intact than reinvented, and longevity matters in an industry where plenty of new operators arrive the week a rebate is announced, undercut everyone on price, then close their doors the moment it’s wound back, leaving customers with warranties nobody’s left to honour. A handful don’t even make it that far, folding before the first round of installations are finished.
Experience is the third pillar, and Cameron’s runs deeper than solar. He learned his trade in the Australian Navy, then spent close to twenty years building his first business, KDEC Electrical, from himself and a single apprentice into a company pushing forty staff before selling a stake to two of his own tradesmen and taking a step back to figure out what came next.
That background shows up in the judgement calls: which brands are worth backing, which aren’t, and how to size a system properly. He points to Sungrow, which has operated in Australia for more than a decade and recently opened a showroom on the coast, as a brand he trusts, precisely because a client can walk in and handle the product before committing to it, rather than betting on a company that only turned up when the rebate did. It also shows up in how he plans for what a household will need next, not just what it needs now.
A decade ago, one client in fifty asked about a battery, and most of those walked away without buying one. Now it comes up in nearly every consultation, and most sign on, because gas cooktops are going, pool heaters are going electric, and a growing share of driveways have an EV parked in them drawing an extra ten or fifteen kilowatt hours a day.
Battery rebates only come around once per household, unlike the solar rebate, so getting the size wrong the first time means paying full price to fix it later rather than simply topping up.
“There’s no cookie-cutter approach,” Cameron says, and it’s clear he means it as more than a slogan.
The fourth pillar is people, and it’s the one that ties the other three together. Nothing at Celtic Solar is subcontracted out. Sales, design and installation are handled start to finish by the same local crew, including Cameron and Chelsey’s son Nixon, a qualified electrician who moved north with them and now works the tools most days, while Chelsey runs the finances and admin, much as she always has. It means the person who quotes a job is accountable for the person who climbs the roof to finish it, rather than passing that risk on to a subcontractor neither Cameron nor the client has ever met.
Behind that local team sits a business three times its size back in Albury, ready with parts, expertise or an extra set of hands whenever the operation requires it, a level of backup most small operators simply don’t have.
It’s the difference between a two-man outfit hoping nothing goes wrong and a business that can absorb a bad month without cutting corners to survive it. Fifteen years on from our first system at Doonan, I’d still take a straight answer over a discount any day of the week. Cameron’s whole business is built on the bet that most people would too, and in Noosa right now, with the solar coaster running faster than ever, that’s not a bad bet to be backing.
