Friday, January 16, 2026
Australian households and small businesses installed record amounts of rooftop solar capacity in December, even as the boom in home batteries continued, with 4.3 gigawatt hours of storage capacity added in 2025.
Data from Green Energy Markets points to 28,800 rooftop systems added in the month of December, translating to a record monthly capacity of 328 megawatts (MW), beating the previous highest monthly total of 318 MW in November, 2023.
According to GEM, the market was hot for both residential and commercial scale rooftop systems, although the annual total reached just 2.82 GW, a 10 per cent fall from the previous year.
The home battery market continued to thrive, thanks to the federal government’s Cheaper Home Batteries rebate, and some supportive state schemes, with 42,000 new systems registered in the month of December, representing total capacity of 1.2 GWh.
That takes the total installed in the 2025 calendar year to 184,000, or a total of 4.3 GWh of nominal capacity. To put that in some perspective, Australia’s total grid-scale battery installations totalled 3,116MW and 6,415MWh in the 12 month to June 30 last year.
“The rebate will taper by battery size, meaning smaller typical household batteries will retain a higher proportion of the rebate, while larger systems will see a reduced per-unit subsidy,” it notes.
“These changes suggest a lower effective STC benefit per battery installation over time, which may bring forward some demand into early 2026.”
GEM says the battery boom has translated into another lift in the average size of rooftop solar system, now at 9.64 kW, as households focus on self consumption, and eye more solar capacity to fill their large batteries.
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor-in-chief of Renew Economy, and founder and editor of its EV-focused sister site The Driven. He is the co-host of the weekly Energy Insiders Podcast. Giles has been a journalist for more than 40 years and is a former deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review. You can find him on LinkedIn and on Twitter.
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