“It’s made us more wasteful:” Solar and battery homes plug in to a new age of abundant energy

Households with solar panels and batteries are enjoying periods of “limitless” electricity, a shift that offers savvy retailers opportunities to develop attractive virtual power plant (VPP) offerings, a new CSIRO-led study finds.

Stephen Snow, a CSIRO research scientist, said his team’s new report – Understanding household energy use in transition – had engaged 35 households in NSW and Queensland since last August to get a granular understanding of how behaviour changed with the introduction of new technologies.

The participants were considered “near future” as they were relatively early adopters of solar, batteries and increasingly electric vehicles in ways “the energy industry would like everyone to be living soon.” Snow told Renew Economy, adding they were all “energy engaged” but not “energy nerds.”

A key finding was that for a number of the households that had adopted large batteries, electricity was often abundant, creating a so-called rebound effect where energy use rose and efficiency mattered less.

The report quoted one participant as saying: “It’s made us more wasteful of electricity and lazy, [because] I rarely put clothes on the line, I whack it in the dryer. Our dryer died 12 months ago and normally you’d replace it with a heat pump [dryer], but why bother, because its free electricity.”

Snow said some of households installing large storage charged by their solar panels were finding themselves in “uncharted territory”. Previously they might have moderated energy usage to save money or because it was good for the environment, but “if you have a big enough battery, then you don’t need to conserve”, he said.

“This brought up some new questions for people, like how do you teach your kids about energy conservation when there appears to be no real need to conserve?” Snow said.

People losing their “tacit knowledge of how to conserve” is not yet a problem for the grid, he said.

Still, during periods when renewable energy supplies are low or energy demand is particularly high – such as during winter in Victoria – has prompted analysts such as Alan Pears to raise concerns about energy-use patterns shaped by three free hours.

“Messaging of ‘bountiful energy’ is a problem as it drives higher peaks and lower utilisation of infrastructure, reflected in higher fixed charges that are unavoidable and potentially disempowering,” Pears told Renew Economy.

The CSIRO report noted that “few households participated in VPPs or exported electricity from their battery at peak times”.

“Reasons for this behaviour appear more aligned with inconvenience than overt unwillingness to share, underscoring the need for more diverse, convenient, and usable demand-side response offerings,” it said.

The CSIRO study is the seventh work package of the RACE2030 Scenario for Future Living Project. UTS, Monash and UNSW were collaborators, along with energy companies and the governments of NSW and Victoria.

Snow said the project would stay in touch with the 35 households to see whether initial responses to having abundant energy was temporary. The work would examine what tariffs households shifted to in order to make better use of their batteries and how they accommodated additional electrification – such as ditching gas cooking and hot water systems – and purchased electric vehicles for transport.

The study coincided fortuitously with the federal government’s Cheaper Home Battery scheme that has prompted more than 540,000 households to add storage since July 2025.

For the participants, cutting power bills was the top motivator for taking part in the study, narrowly ahead of family health and safety, and minimising environmental impacts.

Just as motivations varied, the report’s findings indicated that economics alone did not drive household energy behaviour. Instead, there was a complex interplay of social, technical and even care factors that should inform market designs.

Purchases of new appliances, such as induction cookers to replace gas ones, may come down to what people were familiar with. A single family member wanting to retain gas for wok cooking, for instance, could slow the transition.

Similarly, installing heat pumps may need a trigger, such as an existing gas-fired hot water system reaching the end of its design life.

The report found that electrification pathways “can be opportunistic and tied to appliance replacement cycles rather than deliberate, strategic, or system-wide household purchasing decisions”.

Older children returning to their parents home might also delay the switch if the family thought they might need unlimited hot water, Snow said, unscoring the social component of decision making.

Other social changes, such as increased working from home, increased the prospect of an EV purchase.

“Participants cited their solar generation and work-from-home flexibility as important enablers of their EV purchase,” the report said.

Thirteen of the 35 participants owned a total of 15 EVs and 2 PHEVs – during the period that preceded the US-Israel war on Iran, with its subsequent jump in Australian EV purchases.

The study found households with EVs, as expected, exported less the grid.

“Yet EV households also draw more electricity from the grid during peak times compared to all solar households, indicating the potential to further optimise charging behaviour away from peak times,” the report found.

The addition of a home battery also altered energy use. While the study begain with 7 of the 35 household owning a battery, the number doubled within five months, as the “Cheaper Home Batteries” scheme took effect.

“This rapid home battery adoption reflects national trends, where the amount of new residential batteries installed more than tripled between 2024 and 2025, with expectations of the trend continuing in 2026,” the report noted.
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“Batteries served to flatten household load profiles, compared with the aggregate load profiles of all 31 solar households (ignoring battery and EV status),” it said.

Battery households had less export and lower peak-time usage than the average of all solar households, the report said.

The study also identified households’ concerns about indoor air quality, particularly high humidity and mould associated with prolonged wet weather – features that may have reflected the Queensland and NSW location of the participants.

“While the uptake of air purifiers was relatively modest among Living Lab households, participants’ experiences with planned burns, nearby bushfires, and chronic health conditions demonstrated how air quality concerns can quickly become a priority and encourage the adoption of air purification technologies,” the report said.

Snow said some respondents said they were using their air conditioners to dehumidify their homes.

“They were used to keep pets cool, and so even in unoccupied houses, you might have an air conditioner running to keep a pet cool,” he said. “There was one or two people who’d hang clothes inside, and they’d use the dehumidify function of the air conditioner to just dry the clothes rack if it was really humid outside.”

Such usage may increase in the future, particularly if our cities become more humid as some climate studies suggest.

The research was funded by the RACE for 2030 Cooperative Research Centre in partnership with Monash University, University of New South Wales, University Technology Sydney, CSIRO, Ausgrid, CitiPower, Powercor, United Energy, Red Energy, NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water  and Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (Victoria).

Scenarios for Future Living website FYI, which including details of all other work packages as well as CSIRO’s, can be found here: https://www.monash.edu/scenarios-for-future-living

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