E.ON UK’s £4 m Bet Unlocks Solar for Flat-Dwellers

• E.ON UK invests £4 m in Allume Energy’s SolShare, aiming to bring rooftop solar—and 30-60 % bill cuts—to millions of apartment residents.

E.ON UK has taken a decisive step to crack one of rooftop solar’s last frontiers, investing £4 million (about US $5.4 m/€4.7 m) in Melbourne-founded Allume Energy, creator of the SolShare system that fairly splits the output of a single array between every apartment in a block. The strategic stake will accelerate SolShare’s rollout across Britain, where more than five million homes are in low- and mid-rise apartment buildings that currently cannot tap rooftop PV directly.

SolShare is billed as the world’s first behind-the-meter controller able to meter, allocate and time-shift solar electricity to multiple flats without rewiring or changing suppliers. Allume says the approach can trim individual bills by 30–60 per cent and lift a building’s EPC rating by up to 15 SAP points—benefits already proven on social-housing pilots in Bexhill-on-Sea and Cardiff.

Founded in 2015, Allume has installed the technology on more than 6,000 homes in Australia, the UK and the US, sharing over 14 GWh of clean power to date. A fresh capital raise of A$10.2 million announced this week—of which more than A$8 million came from E.ON—will fund expansion into mainland Europe and help the company hit a near-term target of connecting 10,000 flats worldwide before year-end.

For E.ON the deal dovetails with its wider residential-solar push. In April the utility agreed to take full ownership of Eco2Solar, one of the UK’s biggest rooftop installers, after first buying a 49 per cent stake in 2020. Together, Eco2Solar’s installation muscle and Allume’s distribution technology could create a one-stop platform for house-builders, local authorities and retrofit programmes targeting fuel-poverty hot spots.

“People living in flats experience the highest fuel-poverty rates in the UK, yet have historically been locked out of rooftop solar,” said Allume CEO Cameron Knox, adding that the partnership provides the scale to reach the 300 million Europeans who live in similar buildings. E.ON UK chief Chris Norbury called the move “another important step towards a more inclusive energy transition,” pointing to SolShare’s ability to open the solar market to renters while cutting carbon for landlords. With funding in place, the partners expect to begin commercial deployments this summer, starting with social-housing retrofits backed by the ECO4 subsidy scheme and new-build developments seeking lower lifecycle emissions.