The federal government’s intervention in the Cheaper Home Batteries scheme has taken some of the heat out of a red-hot market – for both home solar and storage – with monthly battery installations tumbling from April’s record high to a total of 1.51 gigawatt-hours in May.
The latest data from industry analysts SunWiz shows the May 1 changes to the national battery rebate delivered the expected “comedown” from frenzied April levels, when consumers scrambled to get the full rebate on super-sized batteries – and the bigger solar arrays needed to fill them.
For more than a month now, federal Labor’s Cheaper Home Batteries has switched over to new settings – a combination of minor adjustments written into the rules at the start and some quite major design rethinks announced in December to make the scheme last longer and go further.
As it stood, the break-neck rate of uptake of discounted home batteries – close to 450,000 have been installed under the scheme so far – and the average size of batteries being installed, which had hit levels nearing 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) by March, was unsustainable.
Under current settings, households can get the full, but slightly lower-rate discount on the first 14 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of usable capacity of a battery system. Bigger batteries can get 60% of the discount on capacity between 14-28 kWh and just 15% on capacity between 28-50 kWh.
