From footnote to feature: How batteries are evolving on the national electricity market

Anzac Day 2026 brought another step-change in the visibility of batteries and flexible load in the National Electricity Market (NEM).

The clearest records were around the middle of the day, when batteries were charging strongly and flexible load – utility battery charging and pumped hydro – was absorbing energy that might otherwise have been curtailed.

The NEM records:

– 12:25 – Battery charging reached 10.7% of NEM consumption, passing the previous record of 9.5% set at 13:05 on Sun 29 Mar 2026. The record standing one year earlier was 4.6% at 11:05 on Thursday 10 Apr 2025.

– 12:25 – Battery consumption effective reached 3,170 megawatts (MW), up from the previous record of 2,830 MW set at 13:00 on Thursday 2 Apr 2026. The record standing one year earlier was 1,327 MW at 11:05 on Thursday 10 Apr 2025.

– 12:25 – Flexible load reached 4,368 MW, up from the previous record of 4,080 MW set at 12:05 on Sunday 29 Mar 2026. The record standing one year earlier was 2,064 MW at 12:45 on Saturday 21 Dec 2024.

The wider NEM context:

Across the day, the NEM still recorded 50.3 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of curtailment, the pink Dolphin Curve surfacing at the top of the NEM graph shown below.

Against that, visible flexible demand included:

– 13.2 GWh of battery load
– 8.2 GWh of pumped hydro load
– 21.4 GWh of flexible load in total

So the records matter, but they sit inside a bigger imbalance. Utility flexible load is growing quickly through a growing fleet of utility batteries, yet curtailment remains larger than the energy being absorbed.

There is also a quieter layer behind the meter.

The Cheaper Home Batteries scheme has reportedly reached 300,000 installations. The earlier official milestone of 250,000+ batteries and 6.3 GWh of storage implies an average of around 25 kWh per battery, suggesting roughly 7.5 GWh of distributed household storage at 300,000 systems.

That is not directly comparable with utility-scale dispatch data. It is less visible, less centrally controlled, and more dependent on customer behaviour and tariffs.

But it is now large enough to matter.

The NEM flexibility story is no longer only about utility-scale batteries, pumped hydro, gas, interconnectors, and transmission. It is also about hundreds of thousands of small batteries absorbing rooftop solar, reducing evening demand, and changing the shape of operational demand from the household layer up.

The question is becoming less about whether batteries matter.

It is how visible, coordinated, and useful they become.

Geoff Eldridge is an energy transition observer at Global Power Energy. This article was originally published here. Republished here with the author’s permission.