Australians installed 276,011 home battery storage systems in the first half of 2026, 52% more than in the previous six months, according to the Clean Energy Council (CEC).
The CEC is Australia’s clean energy industry body, and its biannual Rooftop Solar and Storage Report for January to June records 153 home batteries per 100 rooftop solar installations, up from 130 per 100 in the second half of 2025.
Those home battery storage systems added 8,691MWh of capacity, more than double the 4,221MWh added in the previous six months.
Installations rose in every quarter, from 70,571 in the September 2025 quarter to 154,140 in the June 2026 quarter, which the report’s charts put at about 4,950MWh of capacity on its own.
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Average battery system size climbed from 17.2kWh in July 2025 to a peak of 35.3kWh in April 2026, the largest month for both battery and rooftop solar installations, before easing to 26.6kWh in June. Over the programme’s first 12 months, the average was 28.2kWh.
Rooftop solar also grew. The CEC counted 180,878 systems installed in the first half, 35% higher than the same period in 2025 and the strongest six-month total since 2021.
They added 1,894MW, up 41% and the highest six-month figure on record, and the June quarter was the largest on record for rooftop solar in six of eight states and territories.
The average system size on a six-month rolling basis reached 10.45kW, up 4.5% on a year earlier. The two growth rates use different baselines, with batteries measured against the preceding six months and solar against the same period a year earlier.
Rooftop solar supplied 12.9% of Australia’s electricity in the six months, and cumulative installations since January 2019 reached 2.45 million systems and 21,979MW.
That is close to the roughly 22GW of coal capacity that remains. However, the report notes that rooftop solar’s lower capacity factor means 22GW of it produces about a quarter of the annual energy of 22GW of coal.
CEC chief executive Jackie Trad says: “The historic growth in household renewables is a win for both consumers and the country.”
Subsidy drives volumes, while grid value is still to be tapped
The growth follows the Cheaper Home Batteries Program, a federal subsidy that cuts the upfront cost of small-scale batteries connected to solar by 30%.
It launched in July 2025 after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government won the federal election and is administered by the CER.
Its budget is AU$7.2 billion (US$4.68 billion) over four years, more than three times the AU$2.3 billion Labor pledged during the campaign.
The CEC report counts 457,439 home battery storage systems installed in the programme’s first 12 months, to June 2026, with 12.9GWh of capacity.
Energy-Storage.news reported that the programme had passed 500,000 installations in August.
The pace has tested the industry’s capacity. The CER’s Carl Binning said in November 2025 that the programme was processing about 8,000 applications a week, and that “the system and the capacity of our industry are just about full”.
Wait times were at least three months at that point, and about 4,500 of the country’s 9,000 solar installers were qualified to install home battery storage systems. The report shows the market has since widened, with 2,389 approved sellers at 30 June, half of them in Victoria, and 3,406 approved battery models from 131 manufacturers.
The CEC report says battery incentives appear to be driving new solar installations, with many households adding both, while others retrofit home batteries into existing systems. It does not give a split between the two.
On current trends, it estimates 59.2GWh of consumer storage by 2029-30, 79% above the 33GWh in the 2026 Integrated System Plan of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which runs the national grid and market.
It puts rooftop solar at 40.3GW by then on a linear extension, 13% above AEMO’s 35.8GW, from an installed base of 28.3GW at the end of June.
The report also cites the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, which has argued that AEMO’s near-term household battery storage forecasts are too low.
Most of that storage is used to raise households’ own solar consumption, the CEC says. In contrast, virtual power plants, flexible tariffs and flexibility markets could use it to supply peak demand, absorb surplus solar and ease local network constraints.
It cites earlier CEC roadmap modelling that puts around AU$22 billion in consumer savings at risk if uptake and coordination fall short of AEMO’s forecasts, and is running a Flexibility Value Study to quantify the benefits and identify reforms needed.
Kirsty Gowans, head of the electricity division at the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, said at All-Energy Australia in 2025: “We see the benefit as being avoided network build, avoided use of higher cost electricity at the peak.”
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