Two-thirds of new houses in Australia are being built without solar on the roof or batteries to store the energy according to the Climate Council. What a missed opportunity.
Their just released Seize The Sun report says we could almost double our small-scale solar capacity and install 2M household batteries by 2030. That would add a whopping 26.4 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity from residential & business rooftops. That sounds like a no brainer to me.
It’s not as if we’re afraid of the sun. Already 3.7M homes have rooftop solar—something like 1 in 3 households which is a world record I believe—and on average each of them save over $1,500 per year on energy bills.
In fact the Clean Energy Council also just released a study showing the country added roughly 1.3 GW of rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV) during the first half of 2024 and with nearly 30,000 battery units installed too.
But there’s still a lot of capacity we haven’t tapped yet says the Climate Council. There are another 2.8M owner-occupied houses without rooftop solar as well as 9 out of 10 small businesses, plus 25 GW of battery storage that needs to be installed.
What’s clear is that homes need both rooftop solar and batteries to really make a difference. For example from 2022 to 2023 homes without solar or storage were hit with a $500 average increase in power bills, but it was only $100 for those with solar and a battery.
Strangely enough we foresaw this need almost a decade ago when we introduced Smart Wiring guides so houses could easily handle clean energy like rooftop PV and battery storage. For new homes that’s very simple to do.
We now have a very sophisticated clean energy sector here—there are 7250 approved rooftop solar, inverter and storage products across Australia for instance—and we have the skills, standards and, yes, all that sun.
Cheers, John Fennell
Climate Council study: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/seize-the-sun/