Meet Jim Barlow, Co-owner and Director, Locky Mulholland, Co-owner and CEO, and Alistair Bell, Group General Manager, Acquasol. This group make up the team behind Acquasol, one of 22 ventures participating in the Spring26 Cohort of the Sprout Accelerator.
We caught up with the team for a quick-fire five questions in five minutes to learn more about Acquasol and what the venture hopes to achieve from their time in the Sprout Accelerator.
1. Tell us about Acquasol. What are you building?
Acquasol turns underutilised water assets into renewable energy infrastructure. We design and deliver floating solar systems for reservoirs, irrigation ponds, wastewater ponds and other water assets, allowing businesses to generate electricity without sacrificing productive land. The idea grew from our experience in water infrastructure and a simple question: if these water surfaces are already there, why can't they also help generate the energy businesses need?
2. What problem are you working to solve?
Businesses are facing rising electricity costs and increasing pressure to reduce emissions, but conventional solar isn't suitable everywhere. Roofs can be too small or unsuitable, and covering productive farmland with solar isn't always the best use of valuable land. New Zealand has more than 19,000 identified man-made ponds and reservoirs, so we see a huge opportunity to turn existing, underutilised water surfaces into clean-energy assets.
3. How does your solution work?
We've developed a modular floating solar platform that supports conventional solar panels on water rather than land or rooftops. Acquasol brings together the floating structure, anchoring, solar technology, electrical integration and project delivery into one solution, designed around the customer's existing water asset and energy needs. The result is renewable electricity generated close to where it's consumed, while the surrounding land remains available for productive use.
4. What is the next important milestone for your venture?
Our next major milestone is delivering our Warkworth commercial floating solar project and turning the engineering and commercial modelling we've completed into a full-scale operating reference site. From there, we want to capture real-world generation, reliability and customer savings data and use that evidence to accelerate the growing pipeline of floating solar opportunities we're developing across New Zealand.
5. What are you hoping to get out of your time with Sprout?
We've spent a lot of time proving that we can engineer and deliver the technology; now we want Sprout to challenge us on how we turn that into a genuinely scalable business. I'm particularly looking forward to working with the mentors on customer validation, our go-to-market strategy, commercial model and how we take a New Zealand-developed solution into larger domestic and international markets. I'm also looking forward to learning from the other founders in the cohort; there's enormous value in being surrounded by people tackling difficult problems in completely different ways.
Find out more: www.acquasol.co.nz