The Solar Installer Who Turned a Supply Chain Crisis Into a $40 Million Business

Darren Khoury had a simple theory in 2023: if you own the inventory, you own the market. Three years on, his company Suncore Energy has grown from a seven-person operation on Inkerman Road in Northgate to a 140-staff enterprise with a warehouse complex at the Acacia Ridge Industrial Estate and projected revenue of $41 million for the 2025–26 financial year.

The timing matters. ZEN Energy, one of the country's more prominent renewables brands, entered voluntary administration this week, a reminder that the clean-energy sector is no guaranteed gold rush. Suncore's rise looks deliberate against that backdrop — a case study in what separates businesses that survive an industry shakeout from those that don't.

Khoury's edge was unglamorous. While competitors relied on just-in-time shipments from Tier 1 Chinese manufacturers, he spent $3.2 million in early 2023 to pre-buy six months of panel stock and lease a 12,000-square-metre facility at Acacia Ridge. When anti-dumping investigations and port congestion pushed delivery times out to 22 weeks across the industry, Suncore was quoting customers a two-week turnaround. The phones, by all accounts, did not stop ringing.

Building a Business That Doesn't Depend on One Supplier

Suncore now sources panels from three manufacturers across Vietnam, Malaysia and South Korea, deliberately reducing its Chinese exposure to below 40 percent of total stock. That shift followed conversations with a Queensland government trade adviser through the Trade and Investment Queensland program in late 2024, after Khoury attended a supply chain resilience forum at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre on Merivale Street.

The company also brought inverter installation and battery commissioning in-house in January 2025, previously work it subcontracted to third parties. That decision added $1.9 million in upfront wages and training costs but lifted gross margins from 18 percent to 26 percent within two quarters. Suncore is now one of roughly a dozen firms nationally that can complete a commercial rooftop installation — panels, inverters, battery storage and grid connection paperwork — without touching a subcontractor.

Commercial contracts now account for 63 percent of revenue. The company holds active installation agreements with three shopping centres in the outer Brisbane corridor, a cold-storage logistics operator at the Port of Brisbane, and a private school in Toowoomba that is targeting net-zero operations by 2028. Residential work still runs through a crew based at the Northgate office, handling around 35 installs per month across the northern suburbs.

The Broader Market Is Complicated Right Now

Australia's rooftop solar penetration rate sits at roughly 36 percent of detached dwellings nationally — among the highest in the world — which means the easy residential growth phase is largely done. The serious money has moved to commercial and industrial scale, where projects are larger, more complex and require genuine technical depth. That's exactly where Suncore has positioned itself.

The Clean Energy Council reported in May 2026 that commercial solar installations under 100 kilowatts fell 11 percent in the March quarter compared to the same period in 2025, squeezed by grid connection delays and rising labour costs. Suncore's own commercial pipeline, however, grew 34 percent in that same window — partly because competitors were struggling with the same supply and staffing constraints Suncore had already worked through.

Khoury has flagged an expansion into South East Queensland's light industrial corridor along the Gateway Motorway in the second half of 2026, targeting warehouses and distribution centres whose operators face rising electricity costs but haven't yet committed to solar. He's also in early discussions with a regional energy retailer about a white-label battery storage product, though no agreement has been signed.

For other small and medium operators watching from the sidelines, Suncore's trajectory carries a practical lesson: margin discipline and supply chain control — not just government rebates and cheap panels — are what underpin a durable energy business. The federal government's Rewiring the Nation program continues to funnel billions into grid infrastructure, but the companies likely to capture the most value from that spending are the ones that have already sorted out the basics.