Home battery rebate plan a “game changer” according to Australian NGOs

After three years of campaigning by Solar Citizens and other Australian NGOs for a federal home battery rebate, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently announced a $2.3 billion Cheaper Home Batteries incentive plan, to be launched if the party is returned to government. The program is designed to lower the cost of residential batteries by about 30% and has been called a “game-changer” by those working to ramp up the transition from polluting to clean energy in Australia.

The government expects the Cheaper Home Batteries program will help the nation get to 1 million new batteries by 2030.

“This is a game-changing win that we now need to have met by the Coalition,” said Solar Citizen’s CEO Heidi Lee Douglas. “We are going to keep up the pressure in the coming weeks in the lead up to the election to get commitments for support for this measure by cross bench candidates and all major parties.”

About 320,000 Australian homes already have residential storage batteries according to solar energy consultancy SunWiz, and about a third of the homes that installed a solar system in 2024 opted for a home battery at the same time. That means about 75,000 new battery storage systems were installed across Australia last year — up 47% from the previous year.

The Smart Energy Council says there are 77 different types of residential storage batteries available in the Australian market starting as low as $4,000. A 10kWh battery, the size of a typical home battery, including the inverter, should cost about $10,000 before the subsidy is applied. They note that combining state and federal rebates will make battery purchasing much more likely for tens of thousands of Australians if the program gets up.

Rewiring Australia CEO Francis Vierboom said Australia is a perfect fit for household batteries. “We’ve been so successful with solar, it does put Australia out in front on this challenge. We’ve got a really strong renewable grid that’s already over 40% powered by renewables,” Vierboom said. “We get to...demonstrate and develop the technologies and business models here that the world is going to be following as they work their way through this transition.”

To read more on this story see the article from CleanTechnica.

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