Two new energy innovators are emerging as the big winners of the federal government’s battery rebate scheme, which has succeeded beyond expectations and delivered more than 105,000 new installations and more then 2 gigawatt hours of storage in its first four months.
The success, however, of household battery maker SigEnergy and the Australian retailer Amber points to bigger things happening in the market – the combination of lower cost technology and smart controls that actually do give consumers the power to think differently about the grid.
The democratisation of energy has never seemed quite so close. And that will give the overall industry – and the legacy incumbents – plenty of pause for thought as they negotiate their own transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and try to find their own place in the rapidly changing consumer market.
The Chinese-based Sigenergy is the clear winner in the household battery stakes, maintaining and even extending its lead in the Australian market that it first established in March this year.
The battery market data is tightly held, but Sigenergy is believed to have around 26 per cent of the household battery market, more than double the chasing pack that includes another rapidly emerging brand in Fox ESS, and the old stagers such as Alpha, Sungrow and Tesla.
According to a filing made in September, in the lead up to its IPO, SigEnergy said it had topped the Australian market for five consecutive months, with its market share peaking at 31.4 per cent in May, more than double that of the second-place brand.
That’s a significant achievement. It only entered the Australian market in 2024, and according to its prospectus filing secured just $16 million in revenue in Australia that year, but posted $11 million in just the first four months of 2025.
SigEnergy’s main product, SigenStor, is basically a stackable technology that uses AI to combine battery storage, inverters, DC charging for EVs, vehicle to grid, and smart controls.
It has many imitators, judging by what was on show at All Energy in Melbourne this week, but it is focused on the premium end of the market, and is popular with installers, and clearly with customers.
In the retailing stakes, the dynamics are very different, given that the market is dominated by big legacy players such as Origin Energy, AGL Energy, EnergyAustralia, and the federal government-owned Snowy Hydro brands of Lumo and Red Energy.
But it is the new player Amber, with its unique offering based around wholesale prices, that has emerged as a winner from the battery rebate scheme, snapping up one in five of the new household battery owners, and boosting its own customer numbers by around 50 per cent in just a few months.
And, like SigenStor, it is Amber’s ability to combine solar PV, battery storage, EV charging and now vehicle-to-grid in a package that is easy to understand and simple to use that is attracting customers.
Chris Thompson, co-founder and co-CEO, says around one in five customers buying batteries under the federal rebate scheme are signing up for Amber’s retail offering, helping it boost its own customer numbers to around 60,000.
“This has wildly outperformed even our expectations,” Thompson tells Renew Economy. “We don’t have the exact number, there’s a bit of a lag on it, but we think we’re tracking with about one in five battery rebate people. We’re growing very quickly.”
There has been some considerable debate about what this sudden growth in battery storage means for V2G, and if that will actually be a thing. The industry had thought it would be the other way round.
“I think if you’d asked me six months ago, I would have said V2G will come and eat battery’s lunch,” Thomson says.
But now, he says, households will likely have both, particularly as more households transition to electric vehicles, and look at the opportunities of having both. Thompson says the EVs can be used to power the home, top up household batteries, or trade with the grid.
“Having one doesn’t necessarily preclude the other,” he says, noting that manufacturers are also starting to offer bundles, selling a solar system, plus a battery, a vehicle, and cable chargers together.
And Amber this week struck good progress on its own plans to roll out V2G when it won agreement with BYD to provide a warranty for the EV maker’s car batteries even when using V2G. Other car makers are expected to follow, removing one of the big hurdles for the technology in Australia.
So what does this all look like a few years from now – say by 2030 when Australia is supposed to be reaching, or at least getting close to, its 82 per cent renewables target?
“We have already got four million people with rooftop solar,” Thompson says. “I think you can pretty confidently assume at this point that a large [proportion], maybe even all of those, will end up with a battery.
“A lot of them will have an EV, a lot of them will have V2G or a grid compatible charger. Many, many people, I think, will be essentially grid independent, or as independent as they want to be.
“And I think for us, as a business, we’re just seeing that opportunity of saying, ‘Well, hang on, why can’t we turn households into the backbone of the grid where they’re actually making money … providing the resources, providing that energy into the grid when it needs it.”
