Thousands rush to S.A. home battery scheme before subsidy winds back

More than 5,000 South Australian solar households have piled into battery storage in the space of just five weeks, in a last-minute rush to access a $6000 discount through the state government’s $100 million home battery scheme.

South Australia’s Liberal government announced in early March that it would begin a step-down of its generous and highly successful home energy storage policy, reducing the maximum subsidy from $6000 to $4000 from April 15.

State energy minister Dan van Holst Pellekaan says the announcement sparked a flood of new applications to the HBS scheme, boosting the total uptake of subsidised systems to 12,334, so far.

“Home owners have been banging down the doors of the system providers to get themselves a home battery during the last five weeks,” van Holst Pellekaan said in a statement on Friday.

“South Australia will have an additional 146MWh of additional storage when the 12,334 home batteries are installed which will help reduce electricity bill for all other household customers.”

Not that participation in the scheme needed any boosting. As the minister said last month, it had been a “strong surge” in the number of households taking up the subsidy, and pushing numbers past 7000, that had sparked the decision to start winding it back.

As One Step reported earlier this week (and see the SunWiz chart below), South Australia was already at the head of the pack on home battery storage uptake at the end of 2019, and this latest surge in uptake should keep it there for some months longer, at least.

To read the full story on RenewEconomy sister site One Step Off The Grid, click here…