“I’ll take matters into my hands:” Why demand for household batteries is surging

Solar panel and battery installer Smart Energy is expanding further into Queensland and New South Wales (NSW), as customer demand for batteries rockets. 

Battery demand is up from about 30 per cent of the company’s product mix in December 2022 to almost 60 per cent a year later, says head of storage and dealerships Joel Power.

“Regionally, people like the idea of a battery because they like the sense of autonomy and the security and the independence, but also we have been getting mass amounts of enquiries from our previous solar customers about batteries,” he told RenewEconomy.

Driving the shift is dissatisfaction with current offers from traditional energy retailers as feed-in tariffs fall while night time rates rise, making batteries a more alluring proposition.

“It’s leading people to say I’ll just take matters into my own hands. I’m willing to pay a little bit more to have a deal that I’m comfortable with,” Power says.

The company, which focuses on selling solar and battery systems in underserved regional markets, will now work in Brisbane, Cairns, Sunshine Coast, Townsville, Tamworth and Ipswich, in addition to all other states bar the Northern Territory.

Smart Energy also has operations in Portsmouth, UK and Austin, Texas, but Power says both markets are much less mature than Australia. 

The company has done “plenty” of installations in both countries, but the questions they field from the US are similar to those in Australia when Smart Energy launched in early 2017, with people querying whether rooftop solar is a scam to concerns that it doesn’t actually work, Power says. 

Smart Energy is also starting to offer energy retail plans and electric vehicle chargers to its portfolio.