The retailer behind one of Australia’s most popular virtual power plants says business is booming under the federal Cheaper Home Batteries program, with nearly 3,000 new customers signing up to its VPP offering in the first month, alone.
Since the launch of the rebate on July 01, Australians have been installing discounted home batteries at a cracking pace of around 1,000 new systems a day, according to industry data.
See: Home battery blitz: Astonishing numbers mark first month of game-changing rebate
And these numbers were reaffirmed this week by federal energy minister Chris Bowen.
“Australians are embracing this revolution every single day,” Bowen said from the factory floor of the nation’s only PV module manufacturer, Tindo Solar, on Wednesday.
“Yesterday 1,000 Australians put a battery in their home. Today 1,000 Australians will put a battery in their home under our Cheaper Home Batteries policy.”
But there has been less said about how the virtual power plant (VPP) side of the equation is going.
As One Step Off The Grid has reported, it is a requirement of the Albanese government’s rebate that all batteries installed through the scheme must be capable of participating in VPP.
The hope is that this might help boost VPP participation in Australia, which has so far been pretty lacklustre, with households reluctant to hand over control of assets that have come to symbolise consumer energy independence as well as big energy bill reductions.
The actual joining of a VPP remains voluntary, however, with only Western Australia making it mandatory for rebate participants. In New South Wales and South Australia, there are added state bonuses for households that enrol their discounted battery in a VPP.
So, are more people taking the plunge? According to Amber Electric, the short answer is yes – to its SmartShift VPP, anyway.
“Things are going extremely well,” Amber CEO and co-founder Dan Adams told One Step Off The Grid on Friday.
Adams says that new customers with a battery that are joining Amber are up 4.5x since the battery rebate launched, which is says is much more than the company was expecting.
“Last month, in July, we acquired about 2,800 new battery customers. So that’s up a lot from where it was a couple months ago.”
And it has been particularly busy in NSW, where the state’s Peak Demand Reduction Scheme (PDRS) offers an extra up to $1,500, depending on the battery size, in return for VPP connection.
“In New South Wales, from May to July, [new customers numbers are up by] 5.5x … presumably because of the PDRS subsidy,” Adams says.
In South Australia, where SmartShift is an approved VPP under that state’s Retailer Energy Productivity Scheme, new customer numbers are up by 4.7x.
“Growth overall has been very big, but those two states have been the fastest growing,” says Adams.
But Amber had a head start in the market before the advent of the federal home battery rebate, with its SmartShift offering cited by SunWiz, here, as one of Australia’s largest VPP operators over the period from December 2024 to the end of February 2025.
Adams says the secret to this success is in the VPP’s consumer-focused approach.
“The way that we think about at a high level is VPPs pay a customer to give up control of their assets so the utility can go make money out of that customer’s asset.
“Our model is the customers pay us $25 a month to get access to the market and … we’re optimising [the technology] for the customer’s benefit. The customer gets all the value.
“So it’s kind of flipping the model on its head. It’s being automated for the customer rather than for the utilities.”
Adams says that, while the cost of batteries is still “material” under the federal rebate, it has made the economics of adding a battery to home solar “a no-brainer.”
“When you’re talking about four or five year paybacks, that’s pretty good, you know. It’s hard to get a better return on investment … anywhere else.
“So I think the economics are now at the point that if you can afford to buy battery, or you can get one on finance, you know, it’s a very obvious decision in the way that it wasn’t a few years ago.”
And he confirms that the size of the battery systems customers are installing through the rebate is going up, too.
“I think, you know, before the subsidy, they were probably averaging about 10 kilowatt-hours (kWh) and now it’s getting up to – I think one installer told me – 16 kWh and another told me 20 kWh.
“So the size of the batteries have increased a lot, I think for two reasons,” Adams says. “One is obviously the federal subsidy is on a per-kilowatt-hour basis, and you can only get it once. And so people are saying, well, you know, I might as well get a bigger battery and therefore get a bigger subsidy.
“And then the second one is … if you’re with Amber and you’ve got a bigger battery than you actually need for your house … you can basically just use that additional battery capacity …to charge when it’s cheap and discharge when it’s expensive.”
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.
