Meet the innovator helping 150,000 households manage their solar bills
Brighte founder Katherine McConnell reveals how a shed solar conversion project with her kids helped build a booming national platform.
Katherine McConnell’s children know a thing or two about living off the grid.
Several times a year the founder of Brighte – an energy startup likened to Afterpay for solar and which is used by more than 150,000 Australian households – takes her kids to a converted shed on a farm just outside Wollongong, NSW.
The house was not connected with electricity or water when she purchased it back in 2014 and so McConnell decided to take on a family project.
“When we got it, it was kind of like a house and a tractor shed and it was totally unusable,” she says.
“So we put solar on the roof, installed a battery and there’s a spring a few properties away that feeds the troughs for the cows. We also installed tanks to collect the rainwater.”
In 2015, before the Tesla battery Powerwall was available in Australia, McConnell installed a similar battery, the LG Chem, to store energy collected from the rooftop solar panels during the day.
The Illawarra home ended up being LG’s first battery client in NSW and the first to participate in a virtual power plant (VPP) program, in which individual homes become part of a buy-back program using energy from their batteries.
“When we got the solar and energy-management system, the kids must have been in primary school and it was the first time that they saw how solar works and how the battery works,” McConnell says.
“The kids would run around the house and turn lights off while looking at the app and I thought to myself that the fact these kids are getting their heads around it showed me that this was kind of the future.”
Brighte launched later that year, initially to give solar installers and energy retailers that ability to offer point-of-sale finance to customers.
“Those businesses really appreciated that because previously they didn’t have access to that credit product and (Brighte) removed the friction for them at the point of sale,” McConnell says.
Eight years later and Brighte has evolved as a green energy ecosystem, offering finance for reverse cycle heating and cooling systems, electric cooktops, LED lighting, electric vehicles, solar pool heating and, of course, solar energy and storage batteries.
Her success has won her a place among The List: Top 100 Green Energy Players released in a special magazine and online on Friday, November 10.
The network has thousands of tradies on its platform and has improved the level of service and trust between customers and solar manufacturers and energy companies, McConnell says. Brighte has visibility over the price of installations and can apply some pressure on tradespeople who may be overcharging customers. “We definitely intervene when there are outliers,” she says.
Brighte has landed contracts with the ACT and Tasmanian governments and managing tradespeople risk has played a key role in securing those partnerships.
It has also begun to assess installations.
“From time to time we get customers calling us up and letting us know that their energy savings haven’t been realised or that there’s been something as simple as boxes left in their front yard,” says McConnell.
While Brighte isn’t the installer or the manufacturer of the goods, “we are able to put pressure on the vendor and their solar retailer to say this is going to impact your reputation”.
McConnell trained as an economist and spent 14 years at Macquarie Bank as a senior manager in energy and equipment departments before founding Brighte. Before that she had worked in Treasury and the Department of Finance.
Brighte is backed by Atlassian co-chief executives Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, through their private investment funds Grok Ventures and Skip Capital, as well as Canva billionaire Cameron Adams.
In October this year, it hit $2bn worth of applications through its zero-interest, buy-now, pay-later scheme.
The List of the Top 100 Green Energy Players will be published in The Australian and online on November 10.
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