Josh and I spent a week in Germany and Austria in June, walking the halls of Intersolar, the world’s largest renewable energy exhibition, and touring the Fronius factory.
Here’s why we went, and what it means for your home.
First, a quick introduction for anyone new here. We are Chantel and Josh Gilbert, the husband-and-wife team behind Bluegum, a family-run electrical, solar and air conditioning business in the Macedon Ranges.
When you invest in solar panels, a home battery, or a whole-home electrification plan, you’re placing enormous trust in the products that end up on your roof and your wall. A 10, 15 or 25-year warranty sounds reassuring on paper, but a warranty is only as good as the company standing behind it. A spec sheet cannot tell you whether that company will still be here when you need them.
So, in June, we went to see for ourselves.
Why We Got on the Plane
Last year, one of our suppliers invited us to Intersolar with only a couple of months’ notice. With three kids under eight, we sadly had to decline. We made ourselves a promise: the following year, we’d be there on our own terms. We booked flights 12 months in advance, left the kids in the UK with their grandparents and went this June.
We Had Two Goals
The first was attending Intersolar itself. Held in Munich as part of The Smarter E Europe, it is the world’s largest renewable energy exhibition.
The second was a private, behind-the-scenes tour of the Fronius factory in Austria. If the name is new to you, Fronius makes solar inverters, the box on your wall that turns the power your solar panels produce into power your home can use. It is the brand we trust in hundreds of local homes.
Visiting the factories behind the products we recommend has become a mission of ours. We’ve toured REC’s solar panel factory in Singapore and the Sigenergy home battery factory in China. Our industry has a word for what we’re checking – bankability: the likelihood that the company behind a product will still be around to honour its warranty.
A 25-year warranty means nothing if the manufacturer disappears in year eight. We’ll only put a product in your home that we’d put in our own, and part of keeping that promise is doing this homework in person.
Inside the Fronius Factory
Fronius’ production site sits in the upper Austrian countryside, about an hour and a half’s drive from Salzburg.
The first surprise was how familiar it felt. Every factory we’d toured before was in Singapore or China, where land is scarce, and everything is tight and concrete. This was rolling farmland and a lovely local town, not so different from the Macedon Ranges. Fronius is the heartbeat of that town. You see the name everywhere before you reach the gate.
The second surprise was the scale. The confirmation email warned us to wear comfortable shoes because the tour covers two kilometres. It wasn’t exaggerating.
The Fronius story starts in 1945, when Günter Fronius, an electrical engineer, looked at the car batteries left lying around after the war and saw waste.
He built a charger from leftover materials so they could be reused. The company grew into welding, then solar inverters, and the common thread across 80 years is converting electrical current from one form to another, which is exactly what the inverter on your wall does every day.
Fronius is still family-owned, now led by the founder’s granddaughter, CEO Elisabeth Engelbrechtsmüller-Strauß.
The Details Stayed With Us
A Lamborghini frame on display, because every Lamborghini is hand-welded using Fronius welders. A desk where one person hand stencils the red Fronius logo onto covers, with more than 50 metal stencils hanging above it.
Automated forklifts do the heavy lifting, while the assembly that determines quality is done by people, and some premium welders built start to finish by one person.
A free on-site kindergarten, subsidised canteens, and around 300 EV chargers in the staff car park, managed by software Fronius wrote itself.
Then there were the people.
Our guide told us the workforce is 49 per cent women, almost unheard of in manufacturing, and it was a surprise to see full production lines of women in denim shorts and Fronius t-shirts working side by side to build a premium product.
The floor was not silent either. People were chatting and laughing as they worked, and everyone who walked past said hello. I have never seen anything like it. It is a hard feeling to explain: trust, ethical manufacturing, genuine care, the culture of a small family business that is still alive at a site with around 1,900 staff.
An Honest Admission
Here’s something we hadn’t said out loud before this trip. Over the past couple of years, as batteries have grown bigger and the industry has moved faster, a small cloud of doubt had crept in.
Would Fronius keep pace with the industry? Would they innovate quickly enough for where Australia is heading?
Walking that factory floor put the doubt to rest.
The quality, the people, the pride in the work, and the new products coming to Australia later this year reminded us exactly why Fronius inverters are in our own home and in more than 600 of our clients’ homes across the Macedon Ranges, Sunbury and surrounds.
We filmed interviews and product walkthroughs while we were there, and we’ll share those with you soon.
Inside the Biggest Energy Event on Earth
Then came Intersolar.
The numbers are hard to picture until you’re standing in them: the 2025 event drew around 107,000 visitors from 157 countries and more than 2,700 exhibitors.
All-Energy in Melbourne, Australia’s largest renewable energy event and one our whole senior team attends every October, hosts around 16,000.
To put the scale in perspective, the Munich exhibition halls cover roughly 200,000 square metres, about five times the exhibition space of the entire Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. We walked 25,000 steps a day across ten exhibition halls, including entire halls dedicated to EV charging and neighbourhood-scale batteries.
What Struck Us Most Was How Global This Industry Is
Every lanyard that walked past came from a different country: Chile, Spain, Poland, China. More than once, people assumed ours said “Austria” rather than “Australia”.
We also learned something that now shapes how we choose products: where Australia sits in a manufacturer’s priorities matters.
For Sigenergy, Australia is the biggest market, so products are designed for Australian homes first. For other brands, Australia is one slice of a very large pie, and updates arrive on their timetable, not ours.
What This Trip Means for Your Home
The part we keep coming back to is this.
We’ve worked in this industry for more than a decade, and Intersolar still overwhelms us. If that’s how it felt for us, we can only imagine how it feels for a homeowner comparing quotes, brands and conflicting advice at the kitchen table.
That’s the job we came back more committed to than ever: doing the homework so you don’t have to.
Visiting the factories. Meeting the people behind the brands. Choosing partners who will still be here, and still be supported, 10 and 20 years from now. When we recommend a system for your home, it carries all of that behind it.
If you’re weighing up solar panels, battery storage or a full home electrification plan for your forever home in the Macedon Ranges or Sunbury, we’d love to help you make the decision once and make it right.