The AFR reported last week that home battery installs have fallen sharply. Total capacity installed over the last three months is down almost 70 per cent from the April peak, after the government changed the subsidy settings and installers took time off following months of round the clock work.
One line in that piece came from Kunal Kapoor, a director at RK Solar Energy Solutions in Sydney's Castle Hill. He said many of his customers assumed the rebate had ended entirely in May.
The scheme hasn't ended. It's still running, and for most households it's still worth thousands of dollars off the price of a battery. What changed on 1 May was the size of the discount and the way it's calculated. We've broken down the new tiers and what they mean for a typical system here if you want the detail.
Three months of data has now landed, and it says something more useful than a slump.
What the numbers show
Chris Bowen has confirmed that more than 500,000 batteries have now been installed by Australian homes and businesses since the scheme launched a little over 13 months ago. According to AFR Weekend's analysis of Clean Energy Regulator data, around $4.3 billion has come off the cost of those systems since July 2025, well beyond the $2.3 billion originally slated to cover four years. The budget was expanded in December to keep up with demand.
Those overall totals cover a very uneven year, and the shape of it explains a lot of what's followed. Households were rushing to install before the rebate changed, and that rush peaked in April, when 3.1 gigawatt hours of battery capacity went in. Once the new settings took effect on 1 May, and the installers who'd been working almost round the clock for months finally took a break, capacity installed that month fell around 85 per cent, according to SunWiz managing director Warwick Johnston.
That drop looks less like a collapse once you account for what caused it. A lot of April's volume was people bringing purchases forward to beat the deadline, so demand pulled into April is demand that was never going to show up in May regardless of what the government did.
The months since back that up. Johnston said the market has recovered pretty well, with July landing just shy of a gigawatt hour. That's roughly what Australia was installing in October last year, before the rush began, which suggests the market has settled rather than stalled.
Household batteries remain the part of the energy transition that's moving fastest. The AFR notes the boom stands in contrast to sluggish recent investment in large scale wind and solar farms, and more than three quarters of installs are in rural, provincial or outer metropolitan areas.
The tiers did what they were designed to do
Before 1 May, the rebate applied one flat STC factor to every kilowatt hour of usable capacity, regardless of how big the battery was. That meant a supersized battery cost roughly the same as a modest one on a per kilowatt hour basis. Solar Choice, which tracks the rebate closely, reported that average battery size roughly doubled under those settings, and the surge in large systems was a big part of why the scheme was on track to be fully allocated well ahead of its 2030 end date. The tiers were meant to pull that back without stopping people buying.
Johnston said average battery sizes have come down from their April peak, but are still well above the pre rebate average. That's the outcome the design was aiming at. People are still buying more storage than they would have without the scheme, just not as much as the old flat rate encouraged.
Kapoor described customers taking much longer over the decision and thinking harder about size rather than installing the biggest battery they could get. He put it as people adjusting mentally to a new normal, and said sales at his business are down around 50 per cent from the highs.
A quieter market also explains how the misconception took hold. Installers went quiet at the same time the rebate got smaller, so it's easy to see how someone might link the two and assume the scheme had ended. It hadn't. The tiers are designed to hold the discount at around 30 per cent of upfront cost across battery sizes. The rebate hasn't ended, and it's worth checking the current numbers before ruling a battery out.
What a smaller discount means for the payback
A smaller upfront discount means a longer wait to break even, on paper. Our earlier post on the tiers put a number on it: for a battery above 14 kWh, the ROI timeline typically extends by one to two years compared to the old rebate. That's the cost of the smaller discount, in the currency that actually matters, which is time.
What closes that gap, or opens it further, is what your battery does every year while it's paying itself off.
A traditional retailer buys energy on the wholesale market, adds a markup, and sells it back to you. They make more money the wider that gap gets, which gives them no reason to help your battery do anything beyond the basics. So your battery gets left in self-consumption mode: it stores your solar during the day and runs the house on it at night, which does save you money, but any energy left over once you've covered your own use is either sitting there unused or being exported at a low, fixed feed-in rate. None of that speeds up the payback the smaller rebate just made longer.
Amber doesn't work that way. We pass through the wholesale price of energy with no markup, in both directions, and our only margin is a flat monthly subscription. We don't earn more when your battery earns more, so there's nothing stopping it from doing more. SmartShift, our battery automation, charges your battery when wholesale prices are cheap or negative, then sells what you're not using when prices spike, which can be worth up to $19/kWh during those peaks. You keep 100 per cent of it, and every dollar it earns comes off the payback clock the smaller rebate extended.
A battery is on your wall for ten to twenty years. The one to two years the smaller rebate adds to your payback is a fixed cost. What your battery earns along the way is not, and it's the bigger number over the life of the system.
Where this leaves things
The steep fall in installs after April looks less like the scheme failing and more like it doing exactly what a scheme correcting for oversized purchases should do. Volumes have recovered to roughly where they sat before the rush began, average battery sizes have settled well above where they were before the rebate existed at all, and the funding is there to keep the program running through to 2030. None of that supports the idea that the rebate has ended, and it hasn't.
What has changed is the shape of the return. A smaller upfront discount pushes the payback out by a year or two on larger systems, which means more of what a battery is worth now comes from what it earns while it's installed rather than what you saved on day one. That was already true before 1 May. It just matters more now.
Want to see what your return on investment would be with wholesale prices? Run the numbers here.
