Garry Williams — Founder

Thirty-five years of finding
out what fails out here

He learnt it at his own place first…

Garry Williams started installing off-grid power in 1991, working with Australia’s first generation of solar panels. He founded Solar Service Centre that year — the business that trades today as Empowered Offgrid — and spent the thirty-five years since working out what survives in the Australian bush and what quietly doesn’t.
In 1991 he bought bushland at Wootton, on the Mid North Coast, and built there: hardwood and poured earth, no power line, no fallback. He lived off-grid on that property for twenty-three years. Every battery chemistry, every regulator, every inverter that arrived on the Australian market in that time got run at his own house, on his own family’s power, before it was ever specified for a customer. That is the difference between knowing a system works and having found out what happens when it doesn’t.

Living off-grid for 23 years…

Garry Williams started installing off-grid power in 1991, with Australia’s first generation of solar panels. That same year he built in bushland near Wootton with hardwood and poured earth, and lived off the grid on that property — testing every battery chemistry, regulator and inverter that came onto the Australian market on his own family’s power before it went near a customer’s system.
Garry Williams
  • The 1990s.

    Alongside the installation work, he ran workshops across the Mid North Coast on alternative building and energy systems, and studied and taught permaculture at Djanbung Gardens with Robyn Francis.

  • The 2000s.

    He ran his electrical contracting and solar installation business out of Wootton — grid-connect and stand-alone systems, licensed and accredited — while founding the Wootton Community Network, helping establish a community-run café, and coordinating local sustainability fairs for more than a decade.

  • Since

    He moved the business to the Hunter and has traded as Empowered Offgrid since 2019. More than two hundred and fifty off-grid systems are installed and running, along with hybrid, solar pumping and grid-connect work, across the Hunter, the Mid North Coast and the properties in between.

Thirty-five years of that is now written into how this business works. Systems are sized for the worst week of the year, not the best day. A generator goes in as part of the design, not as an admission that the design fell short. Every system is monitored, and every system is serviced, every year. Garry set that standard; it is how we design, install and service every job now.

"There's no such thing as 97% reliability. It needs to be 100%."

— Garry Williams
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