Half a million installs: How the Cheaper Home Batteries program has reshaped our energy system in one year
Just over a year ago, the Federal Government launched the Cheaper Home Batteries Program, promising to knock around 30% off the upfront cost of installing a home battery.
Thirteen months later, in mid-August 2026, Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stood in front of a solar and battery installer in Castle Hill, NSW, to mark a milestone few predicted the scheme would hit this fast: more than 500,000 batteries installed.
Here’s what’s actually happened over the program’s first year,
The headline numbers are impressive
The scheme has moved faster than almost anyone expected. It reached 100,000 installations by late October 2025, 200,000 by mid-January 2026, 250,000 by early March, and crossed the half-million mark in mid-August 2026, roughly 13 months after launch.
At the Australian Clean Energy Summit, Bowen admitted the pace had caught even him off guard. He’d been confident it would succeed, but not to this extent.
That success came with a cost problem. The program was originally budgeted at $2.3 billion, but by December 2025 uptake was running so far ahead of forecast that the government expanded funding to an estimated $7.2 billion over four years and lifted its 2030 target from 1 million to roughly 2 million installed systems.
Along the way, the battery installation workforce has roughly doubled too, with the number of accredited installers rising to 8,846 since the scheme began.
Regional and outer-suburban Australia is driving it
More than three-quarters of batteries under the program have gone into outer suburban and regional communities rather than inner-city areas. Electorates like Hume, Mitchell, Greenway and Macquarie in NSW, Wright in Queensland, and Mayo in South Australia have led the charge, with some electorates now seeing more than 10% of households owning a subsidised battery.
The Smart Energy Council has pointed out that this uptake pattern cuts across party lines, with the program performing strongly in Coalition-held seats as much as Labor ones, suggesting the appetite for battery storage isn’t a partisan phenomenon so much as a hip-pocket one.
It’s already changing how the grid behaves
The most consequential story of the program’s first year might not be the installation count but rather what those batteries are starting to do to the electricity system.
AEMO’s quarterly reporting has found that the growing fleet of home batteries is measurably reshaping demand patterns, with stored solar being drawn down after sunset to flatten the evening peak.
AEMO chief Daniel Westerman said the scale of this effect surprised the market operator, given that the vast majority of these batteries are operating “passively” – homeowners simply using their own stored solar – rather than being centrally coordinated. Even without orchestration, he said, that behaviour delivers “enormous benefit” to the grid by reducing costs both for the battery owner and for everyone else on the network.
By some estimates, the installed fleet under the scheme now represents somewhere in the order of 13–14 gigawatt-hours of behind-the-meter storage (the government hasn’t published an official capacity figure alongside the 500,000 milestone). Minister Bowen has claimed that puts Australia’s home battery fleet ahead of the entire United States’ residential battery capacity, a remarkable achievement and a literal example of people power!
There have been (and still are) a few rough edges
It hasn’t been a clean run. Three issues have dogged the program through its first year:
Cost blowouts from oversized systems. Early analysis found the scheme was burning through its budget faster than installation numbers alone would suggest, because households were opting for larger-than-necessary batteries to maximise their rebate.
By December 2025, roughly 30% of the original funding pool had been spent on under 15% of the projected 1 million installations. In response, the government introduced a tiered discount from 1 May 2026, tapering support for batteries beyond 14kWh so the subsidy better matches what a typical household actually needs.
Installation quality concerns. An April 2026 regulatory report found a concerning proportion of installations under the program were falling short of compliance standards, raising both credibility and safety questions, and pointing to the pressure an already-stretched electrician workforce is under trying to keep pace with demand.
Who’s missing out. Renters and apartment dwellers (around one in 10 Australians) are largely locked out, since the scheme requires pairing a battery with rooftop solar on a property the applicant can modify.
Energy groups, including the Australian Energy Council and ACOSS, have welcomed the scheme’s broader grid benefits but flagged that vulnerable households and renters need a parallel pathway, such as shared or community battery models, to share in the savings.
The full picture is still taking shape
One intended aspect of the scheme has fallen well short of what the Government and AEMO were hoping to see. While every battery installed under the program has to be technically capable of joining a Virtual Power Plant (VPP), signing up isn’t mandatory, so only around 10% of eligible households have actually connected theirs to one.
AEMO had been counting on stronger VPP participation as a way to coordinate distributed batteries at scale, so this remains a gap between the program’s installation success and its original vision for orchestrated, grid-responsive storage.
Overall, the program has landed at an interesting moment for the energy transition. Rooftop solar uptake in Australia is already the highest in the world, with more than one in three households carrying panels, but batteries had remained a relatively niche add-on until this scheme arrived.
AEMO’s modelling had suggested the grid needed around a million home batteries by 2030 to help keep bills in check. The fact that it’s only taken a year to get halfway to that target is an extremely positive sign, in fact leading to a doubling of the target.
Commentators have also started framing this as the start of a bigger structural shift rather than a one-off subsidy story. Households are increasingly acting as producers and storage providers as well as consumers.
Because of those factors, however, the argument for a more significant redesign of the energy market has been growing. A system built around large, centralised generators still has some way to go to be properly shaped to handle a grid which includes millions of small, distributed batteries.
Whether the program can hold that momentum through cost pressure, political scrutiny (the Coalition has criticised it as skewed toward wealthier households who can afford the upfront cost, even after the rebate), and the unresolved question of renters and apartments will be the story to watch in year two.
GloBird has battery owners covered
At GloBird Energy, we’ve been developing plans to help households with solar arrays and batteries make the most of their investment for a few years now.
Our research and development team quickly realised that a home battery is only as good as the energy plan it’s paired with, so we created ZEROHERO, an offering that was purpose-built for households with solar and battery storage. It’s structured around four key benefits that reward smart energy behaviour. Basically, customers can charge up their battery for free during the middle of the day, get paid every day to use their battery, and get extra feed-in credits. The result is an award-winning battery energy plan. Read all about ZEROHERO on the GloBird website and see if it would work well for you.
Meanwhile, we’ve started to develop partnerships with complementary energy businesses, such as strategic Virtual Power Plant (VPP) partnerships with Anker SOLIX, RayAmp, and other leading providers of residential energy storage solutions. You can read more about that here.