Australia’s commercial solar blind spot: why maintenance can no longer be an afterthought

It is a threat that not only undermines investor confidence and erodes return on investment (ROI) but also jeopardises the reliability of the grid and Australia’s clean energy ambitions.

We have seen firsthand how poorly understood, inconsistently applied, and often completely absent solar PV maintenance practices have created a gaping hole in the sector’s performance fabric. It is time we stopped pretending it is someone else’s problem.

This is an issue for every business with panels on its roof, for every asset manager trying to build a portfolio, for every policymaker backing a 24/7 renewable-powered future.

The myth of ‘set and forget’ solar

For too long, solar PV has been marketed and purchased as a passive asset. “Install it and forget it” or “no moving parts means nothing can go wrong” are narratives that have been deeply internalised by businesses and building owners. And why would it not be? Solar promises lower energy bills, a reduced carbon footprint, and reliable operation with few moving parts.

But the reality? Solar PV systems are complex, electricity-producing assets, spread out over rooftops, exposed to the elements 24/7, and increasingly paired with sophisticated inverters, metering, and energy management systems. They are not self-sustaining. They need upkeep.

The truth is, even under ideal weather conditions, losses are creeping in due to an array of technical issues, shading, soiling, compliance failures, installation errors and faulty components. If that particular fault or degradation item goes unnoticed and unreported, then the whole system can be greatly undermined. For example, storm damage increases the likelihood of earth faults on an inverter and damaging it.

If not monitored or inspected, the owner would never know that the inverter is down, likely creating more issues, including damaged system componentry or even rooftop or inverter fires, as we have seen in recent cases.

Aside from external damage, as systems age and deteriorate, issues occuring at least once a year are common, materially impacting safety or performance.

Most underperformance is preventable

The majority of system underperformance in solar has nothing to do with dirt on panels. Despite what every solar cleaner might say, soiling is rarely the main culprit. The real damage comes from technical issues: inverter faults, earth faults, isolator degradation, poor component quality, or aging systems that have not been inspected in years.

And whilst exact figures are hard to say, just as you can not definitively say how many car crashes would be avoided with more frequent servicing, we can confidently say that a large percentage of this underperformance is preventable through proactive maintenance, real remote monitoring, frequent human inspections and smarter system design and installations.

Take something like an earth fault as described before. If you are not monitoring your system, you might not even know it is there. Meanwhile, that invisible problem could eventually lead to arcs, damaged inverters, or even rooftop fires. Yes, that sounds dramatic but it happens more than it should.

The problem of fragmented maintenance

At the heart of this crisis is a fractured and inconsistent maintenance ecosystem. Right now, most maintenance work is carried out either by small in-house teams or by subcontractors who were not part of the original install. The latter often lacks context. The former lacks scale.

Installers understand the systems best, but they typically avoid maintenance work due to a lack of resources and profitability. Their business models are built around construction, not long-term care. So, we are left with a patchwork of approaches and zero cohesion.

No two portfolios are managed the same way, posing a real problem for national asset owners who need consistent insights, performance metrics, and intervention strategies.

Our business model at Industrias addresses this fragmentation by decentralising the work while centralising the management. This is achieved by contracting out the boots-on-the-roof jobs but keeping the brain of the operation intact. However, we are battling against an industry norm that accepts maintenance inconsistency as just part of the landscape.

Designing for maintenance

It is not just the servicing that is an issue. It is the design too.

Too many solar systems are built in ways that make future maintenance difficult, or outright dangerous. Electrical components like isolators and fuses are often installed on rooftops, exposed to brutal Australian sun and storms, when they could be safely housed at ground level. Inverters are squeezed into inaccessible corners, or worse, on the roof, where a failure means cranes and eye-watering callout costs.

We need to start treating design for maintenance the same way we treat design for performance. That means permanent walkways between panel rows, safe distances from roof edges to allow safety rail installation, and fixed anchor points that remove the need for expensive temporary measures.

Smart electrical design can also minimise points of failure. For example, running individual strings to the inverter rather than paralleling them on the roof means faults can be isolated quickly, rather than causing an entire array to go offline. It is the difference between easily solving a problem and spending hours and thousands of dollars playing solar detective.

The case for mandated inspections

The industry needs a top down approach to legislating certain elements when it comes to maintaining systems. There is no good reason as to why solar systems should not be subject to mandatory annual checks in some capacity, just as cars require a regular inspection to stay registered.

Legislation that enforces not just monitoring, but on-site physical inspections as well. Because whilst monitoring tells you what is happening, being on-site can tell you why it is happening, as well as spot key safety risks remote monitoring simply can not see.

The only explanation is that the commercial solar industry is still maturing, and regulators have not caught up. But we can not keep waiting. We need standards that specify the frequency, depth, and reporting of inspections. We need insurers to mandate it as part of coverage. And we need to close the safety gaps created by poor or nonexistent maintenance.

Let us be clear: we are not calling for overregulation. We are calling for common sense. A rooftop system generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in electricity should not be left unchecked for years at a time.

Empowering asset owners with actionable insights

Finally, we need to empower the people who own these assets.

Too many asset owners are overwhelmed by data. They have got dashboards full of graphs, error codes, and key performance indicators (KPIs), but no idea what to actually do about them. That is where platforms within our offering come in to not only collect data, but also filter and analyse it, to recommend action.

The asset owner does not need to know just about the microcrack, they just need to be told: “This needs replacing and why.” They do not need to understand the inverter waveform, they just need to hear: “This is the performance impact and why you need to get it fixed now.”

That is how you take maintenance from an afterthought to a value driver.

The bottom line

Australia’s commercial solar sector is quietly bleeding over a billion dollars each year. Not because the sun is not shining, but because the systems are not being cared for.

This is not just a cost problem. It is an underperformance, system reliability, and public safety problem. And most of all, it is a credibility problem for an industry that is driving the country closer to a 24/7 clean energy grid.

Because in energy, as in life, what you do not see can hurt you. And it is time we opened our eyes.

Authors

Daniel Lazarus is CEO of Industrias Services, a national solar maintenance and services company.

Chris Martell is director at Diagno Energy, a data-driven solar asset performance and analytics platform.