How rooftop solar and home batteries became “kryptonite” to big coal and the fossil fuel industry

Rooftop solar and home batteries are the “kryptonite” to Australia’s powerful fossil fuel lobby, a Sydney conference has heard, with hundreds of thousands of households adding storage to the millions of rooftop solar systems and “absolutely changing the game” on energy.

Speaking at the Smart Energy Conference in Sydney on Wednesday, the Smart Energy Council (SEC) CEO of 18 years, John Grimes, said the political heft of rooftop solar was revealed in 2014, when the national SRES scheme survived the anti-renewables rein of Tony Abbott, unscathed.   

“We just found our kryptonite,” Grimes recalls thinking at the time.

Flash forward to 2026, and federal Labor’s dazzlingly successful Cheaper Home Batteries scheme – a policy the SEC lobbied hard for and helped to design – has seen households around the country install more than 380,000 energy storage systems and driven a new boom in rooftop solar.

“This is the culmination of all the research and development, the engineering, the manufacturing, the distribution, the finance, the installers, the retailers,” Grimes told the Sydney conference in what will be one of his last major addresses as CEO before he departs the role on May 15.

“It’s a culmination of policy and advocacy. It’s a culmination of government action. And all of that comes together, and it’s come together in an absolutely unique way here in Australia.

“We’re doing something here that has not been done in the world before. We are demonstrating that a bottom-up revolution, driven by individual action, by community action, is changing the dial in a very significant way,” said Grimes.

“That gives us all great hope, because … [while] large-scale is important, … then you have transmission blocks, and then you have social license blocks, and then you have financing blocks, and then you have environmental law blocks, right?

“Well with this transition, you don’t have any blocks at all. You have installers on every rooftop around the country, apprentices, people in the workshop activating literally everywhere at the same time, and absolutely changing the game.” 

Grimes, whose next career move is to head up the Renewable Energy Council Asia Pacific – a standalone organisation created by the SEC that will operate as its regional strategic partner – says the Australian model of consumer energy success should now be rolled out around the world.

“I think not only have we changed the Australian energy system… empowering people with economics, which is just so exciting, but we are going to demonstrate what this means to the whole world.

“We can transition quickly if we adopt the Australian model,” he says. “So suddenly, those vested interests of fossil fuels… can be broken, we can empower and transition rapidly. I think it’s super exciting. 

As for Australia, Grimes’ wish is for the industry to continue making the most of its solar and battery “kryptonite.”

“Now, while we harness all of these people with batteries and home electrification, my strong urging … is double down on that constituency – that is our superpower.

“They may have the vested interests, on the other side, of a handful of big fossil fuel companies. We have the people power of 27 million Australians.”

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