The CEO Magazine profiles Regen Power CEO Dr Nikhil Jayaraj and the Regen Research Lab – how a Perth solar installer turns 45,000 rooftops into research.
PERTH, Western Australia - 5 October 2026
Regen Power CEO
Dr Nikhil Jayaraj has been profiled in The CEO Magazine, in a feature examining how the Perth-founded solar and battery company has built a working bridge between the energy industry and university research - and what that has meant for Australian households.
The feature begins with a problem familiar to anyone in the sector. Installers accumulate enormous amounts of real-world data but rarely have the time to analyse it. Researchers have the analytical rigour but can wait years for access to that data. The two sides seldom work from the same evidence.
Regen Power’s response has been to work on both sides at once. Alongside leading the company, Dr Jayaraj is a Research Adjunct at Curtin University’s Faculty of Business and Law, a Partner Investigator on an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage project and Principal Investigator on a research program funded by Regen Power itself. He has published more than 10 articles in first-quartile academic journals, including Energy Policy. Five PhD scholars are now working on questions that arise directly from the company’s installation base of more than 45,000 Australian homes - around 350 megawatts of distributed generation and several thousand household batteries across five states.
A question that came off the rooftops
Australia has the highest rooftop solar uptake in the world, yet only a small proportion of solar homes had added a battery. The industry had plenty of theories but little evidence. While running the company, Dr Jayaraj completed a Doctor of Business Administration at Curtin University, interviewing more than 50 householders, industry participants and policymakers to understand what was holding storage back. His research pointed to one clear conclusion: without targeted policy support, adoption would stay stuck. Not long after his doctorate was conferred, Australia introduced its national household battery rebate.
The Regen Research Lab
Rather than treat that work as a one-off, the company established the Regen Research Lab. The feature describes how, within a single year, the Lab secured three national research programs:
• An ARC Linkage project developing an AI platform to manage a household battery across its whole life - sizing, operation, degradation and end of life - in a single system.
• A project within the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for net zero buildings, which is turning Regen Power’s installation dataset into a decision-support platform for solar and battery procurement.
• A technical query system funded entirely by Regen Power under the R&D Tax Incentive, which answers homeowners’ questions about rebates, tariffs and grid connection rules - with every answer tied to a cited regulatory clause and held to published accuracy thresholds.
The Lab is also running a longitudinal study tracking the real-world effects of Australia’s battery rebate over its first two years. All of its findings are published openly, so that policymakers, researchers and other installers - competitors included - can use them.
Growth built on trust
The article notes that Regen Power’s growth has been built on customer trust rather than discounting: a 15-year workmanship warranty against an industry standard of 10, a 4.9-star customer rating and ProductReview recognition six years in a row. The company has been ranked among the Australian Financial Review’s fastest-growing companies and named in the Financial Times’ Asia-Pacific High-Growth 500 four times running.
It also carries people. More than 50 students have come through Regen Power’s internship program, which provides a structured pathway into full-time graduate positions – the same path Dr Jayaraj took after joining the company as a graduate in 2010, working across sales, business development and operations before becoming CEO in 2018.
Regen Power was founded in 2003 by the late Emeritus Professor Chem Nayar of Curtin University, who believed that research and the market belonged together. More than two decades on, the feature suggests, that founding idea still shapes the company.
From Dr Nikhil Jayaraj
“It’s a privilege to be featured, but this is not really a story about one person,” Dr Jayaraj said. “It belongs to Professor Nayar, who founded Regen Power on the idea that research and installation should never be separated; to a team that has looked after more than 45,000 Australian households; and to the researchers at Curtin who are helping us turn what we learn on rooftops into evidence the whole industry can use.”
“We publish what we find because the question of how Australia electrifies its homes is bigger than any one company. If something we have learned helps another installer put a better battery system on a roof, that is a good outcome for the customer and for the grid.”
In the feature, Dr Jayaraj describes the model as a loop in which “the rooftop teaches the research”, and the research, in turn, finds its way back onto the customer’s roof.
Read the full feature at The CEO Magazine:
Read the full article
About Regen Power
Founded in Perth in 2003 by Curtin University’s Emeritus Professor Chem Nayar, Regen Power is a Western Australian solar, battery and EV charging specialist with more than 45,000 installations across Australia. Rated by SunWiz as the number one solar installer in Western Australia and second nationally, the company offers a 15-year workmanship warranty, holds a 4.9-star customer rating and operates the Regen Research Lab in partnership with Curtin University and the Australian Research Council. Power That Doesn’t Cost The Earth.
regenpower.com
