Best-selling battery supplier installs 25,000 systems in a month, says bigger still better after rebate changes

Fox ESS, the China home battery manufacturer that stormed to the top Australian sales charts in March, says it will continue to push the ‘bigger is better’ message under the new settings of the federal rebate, including by offering discounts of its own on its higher capacity products.

The Wenzhou-based company, which first launched in Australia in 2019, claimed highest installed storage capacity (kilowatt-hours) in Australia in March this year, after installing more than 12,000 systems in February.

According to Fox ESS managing director of APAC and Middle East, Brooks Richard, the company’s April numbers more than doubled that – with a total of 25,000 systems installed in April – well above its March numbers, too, of 19,000 installations.

And while he expects that the market might start to settle down, just a little, under the second stage of Cheaper Home Batteries – with the rebate rate ratcheted down and the settings adjusted to incentivise smaller systems – he says the case for home sized up to 42 kilowatt-hours (kWh) is still strong.

“I think maybe the first three weeks of May, it might be slowing down a little bit because …a lot of retailers and installers might be taking some time off,” Richard tells Renew Economy.

But, he adds, with the sort of momentum that has built up behind the home battery market in Australia, “you cannot just stop it, suddenly. The market is still going to be big.”

The more pertinent question is whether consumers will still go big on battery capacity under the new settings of the rebate.

As Renew Economy has reported, from May 1, systems installed through the rebate will continue to receive the full, but slightly lower-rate, discount on the first 14 kWh of usable capacity. For batteries bigger than 14 kWh, the system will get 60% of the discount on capacity up to 28 kWh. Capacity between 28 kWh and 50 kWh will get 15%.

The system sizes driving Fox ESS’s domination of rebate sales have been 28 kWh and 42 kWh.

“I think a lot of people out there, because some people are driven by the rebate, some people are thinking about, like, maybe I go [for] a 14 up to 28 kilowatt-hour, because this is the comfort zone for the rebate,” Richard says.

But he feels confident that the combination of the current energy crisis, households electrifying their homes and cars, and the introduction of the Solar Sharer offers around Australia starting in July will keep consumers focused on installing larger systems.

For those who need a little convincing in that direction under the new rebate settings, which in some cases has roughly halved the discount available for a 40 kWy battery, Fox ESS is offering its own discount.

“At Fox, we’re going to do a promotion… matching the Cheaper Home Battery scheme, that we’re going to have the CQ7-V6 version, which supports only 42 kWh and above. For the CQ7-V6 master version, you give $1,000 off,” Richard says.

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