Australia's federal government will now spend A$7.2bn ($4.8bn) on subsidies for households and small businesses to buy battery storage systems as it grapples with increasing small-scale solar power installation.
The programme will grow from the prior A$2.3bn, which was the previous amount allocated to the initiative, because of over-subscription to the scheme so far, Australia's energy minister Chris Bowen said on 13 December.
The initiative provides discounts of about 30pc for the upfront installation costs for small-scale battery storage systems with a range of 5-100kWh. The discount has already been taken up by 155,000 customers, Bowen said.
The expansion will see 2mn batteries totalling 40GWh capacity installed by 2030, the government estimates.
Canberra will tier the subsidy starting May 2026. This means that the discounts are applied to the first 50KWh, for systems up to 100KWh.
This links the discount to the number of certificates the system will generate under Australia's small-scale renewable energy scheme. The certificates work by a retailer or installer applying for the credits, which will then be sold on behalf of the buyer, reflected in a discount on the quoted cost of a battery system. After 1 May 2026, the general number of certificates created by each KWh of a battery will be cut from 8.4 to 6.8, with the additional adjustments for medium and large systems.
Australia's retail energy prices have soared despite large-scale take-up of rooftop solar in the sun-drenched nation's suburbs, with one in three households in Australia having a rooftop solar array. Canberra is hoping that switching energy usage to the hours in the middle of the working day could help alleviate rising bills, which are a political problem for the government.
