Home battery installations passed a major new milestone last week, when – for the first time – more residential energy storage systems were registered nationally in one day than rooftop solar systems..
Industry analyst SunWiz says data shows that just under 1,000 battery systems were registered in the STC registry on July 16, compared to just under 900 PV systems, signifying a changing of the guard from solar to batteries.
As you can see in the chart below, this pattern then continued over the next two days, with battery installs sitting at around 1,000 systems per day, while PV installs dipped to around 700 systems.
The milestone comes just over two weeks after the launch of the federal government’s Cheaper Home Batteries rebate, which cuts the cost of installing solar storage by up to around 30 per cent.
“The day has come. More Batteries than PV,” SunWiz founder and managing director Warwick Johnston wrote on LinkedIn over the weekend.
“In the first 17 days of the Cheaper Home Battery program, there were over 7,000 battery systems registered, and that rate is ramping up quickly.”
According to SunWiz data, nearly half of all the batteries registered through the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES) have been in New South Wales (41%), followed by Queensland, at 22 per cent.
Another 17 per cent of the batteries registered through the SRES have been installed in South Australia, with Victoria and Western Australia accounting for 12% and 5%, respectively.
The low WA numbers are interesting, considering that, in that state, households applying for a home battery rebate must join a virtual power plant for a minimum of two years. Although it’s much too early to say whether this might be acting as a deterrent to uptake, it is something to watch.
For now, the key take-away, says SunWiz’s Johnston, is that energy storage systems (ESS) are stealing the limelight from rooftop solar – for the moment, at least.
“In May there was a big surge in ESS retrofits (red, in the chart below) as existing PV customers wanted to get a battery as quickly as possible,” he tells One Step Off The Grid.
“In June we’re seeing continued decline in PV-only systems as a portion of the market. There’s growth in the PV+ESS market, with those customers split between pre-existing PV and ‘greenroof’ PV.
“We predict there is currently a focus on retrofit systems to unchanged existing PV, but when the market returns to stable growth then we will see a return to ESS + upgraded PV or ‘greenroof’ new-build ESS+PV.”
Johnston says SunWiz will be following the progress of the Cheaper Home Batteries rebate – including the average size of the systems households are installing – with monthly updates incorporating data from STC registrations with other predictive analytics and industry intelligence.
Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and editor of its sister site, Renew Economy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.
