The program has so far spent $2.5bn, and installed 11GWh. That's just the cost of the subsidy (~30% discount), not the cost of what home owners tipped in.

Utility scale batteries are now at ~$66m/GWh, or about ~$726m equivalent.

It does not make sense for everyone to be doing a bespoke installation inside their own home. It is ridiculously inefficient.

We are a society. We don't build our own roads, water, grid, schools, hospitals. Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources? (A: failure of governance)

Fair points, but you are glossing over important issues:

1. You are using the current point-in-time cost for batteries as compared to a subsidy spent over years while battery costs were dropping.

2. You do not include transmission upgrades and costs to distribute energy from centralized batteries.

3. You ignore the benefits and efficiencies of having generation and batteries distributed and close to the source of demand. It also increases resilience of the grid.

4. You assume the political will was there for government and taxpayers to bear the full cost burden of development of the batteries.

I agree 100%, this is one of the most inequitable government policies I've ever seen in this country. The numbers are much worse than you make out. The program has spent more than 2.5bn (the projected figure) and we don't know yet how much. The subsidy was closer to 70% for a typical large battery install. The government's own gen cost report would have put grid storage 1.5x ahead on ROI.

Note that figures like $66m/GWh are projected costs based on projects starting today, not coming online today. They may not include 'balance of plant'. For better comparison you would have to look at the financials of recently commissioned storage.

There was an article a few years back about how homeowners in Hawaii were buying solar panels to try to get cheaper power.

Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.

Installing on people’s houses isn’t just about install costs (the numbers for which above I highly doubt). There’s a huge additional benefit, and cost reducing factor, that comes from installing storage where grid connection already exists. Instead of building out battery farms in the desert and piping the power into urban centers over cables like a power plant, you can install capacity and run it essentially p2p. This is a big deal.

I’ll add that we’re not DIYing this. Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. Also, though I’m not sure how it works outside the US, the government doesn’t build the grid. Energy providers and utilities are also companies.

A distributed grid is a resilient grid. Legacy grid needs massive transmission infrastructure. Solar + batteries at home have zero real estate costs, zero transmission infrastructure costs. Keeps a lot of people employed.

Decentralization might be dollar-inefficient, but brings resiliency and redundancy to the system. The whole internet infrastructure would be probably cheaper with more centralization. Data backups are also ridiculously innefficient dollar-wise.

Not all inneficiencies are bad. If the cost to build ridiculously redundant systems is low enough, the system overall is more robust to black swan events than any central planner could ever be.

My neighbour has a battery installation because where I live they subsidise both - the panels and the battery. In the event of a power outage he can keep running his house for ~3 days if being somewhat frugal with consumption.

And the battery thing even looks kind of neat.

It makes enough sense in rural areas for a Vermont power company to lease batteries to residential customers. They avoid having to do expensive upgrades that way:

https://electrek.co/2026/07/28/vermonts-largest-energy-sourc...

Honestly this seems like a pretty good efficiency multiplier for a distributed vs. centralized solution at that scale!

Sort of. While not really mainstream, there are private roads (and long driveways), wells, and a (limited) amount of home-schooling. Not hospitals obviously as that requires specialized training and equipment.

Are we a society though? Margaret Thatcher famously said "There's no such thing as society" and a lot of people have been doing their best to make that true.

There's no use pretending. Utility scale has a single political point of failure. Batteries in home do not.

Cost is never the only factor though. Being energy independent and self-sufficient feels awesome. Also whole house backup rocks, together with a smart app showing and optimizing your energy usage.

Is this not free market capitalism?

Domestic electricity was too expensive (and I’m assuming producers would rather pass the costs onto consumers rather than spend their own money and build solar/battery plants themselves), so individuals with capital did the cost-benefit analysis and determined that installing solar is cheaper in the long term.

This drove the price of electricity down during the day, causing the cost-benefit of home-scale batteries to become positive over a reasonable timescale. Thus, people with capital invested money for a positive ROI over a medium term!

The government subsidies level the playing field so it’s not only the upper-class that can benefit from this phenomenon - they are providing equity, not equality. And, cutting out all the middle management waste of the large utility companies, meaning Australians get more electricity for their buck.

Modern capitalism is what failed here. The Australian power providers should’ve gone down this route, but (I’m assuming) shareholders would be upset about ROI on the scale of 5-20 years. Homeowners are more reasonable.

That’s great value for money! Even with gas peaked plants that would cost roughly $10 billion in the US. They should massively expand this program.

The subsidy has the effect of prompting the wealthiest consumers to spend around 2.25x the amount of subsidy on battery installations while reducing the load on the grid, lowering prices for all grid users.

Investing in more grid power would require additional grid capacity which would raise the price for all grid users, and with cheap renewables that would be an increasing amount on power bills.

There are still advantages to distributed power generation beyond overcoming governance failures—-microgrids lie somewhere in between and can increase resilience in the face of more severe and unpredictable climate events.

Do you have some citation to back those numbers up?

> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources?

That's simple! As per Felon Musk - to sell overhead to electricity providers. Allegedly they will gladly buy energy from you! So with big enough roof, you can just sit home relax and watch TV, while your solar panels make your living.

> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources?

Because government is failing to address these issues?

Back in Trumpistan we had some storms roll through my area the other day. Power has been out for some (not me, thankfully) for a couple of days in a major metro. It was a bad storm and I do not fault the crews who are doing hard work out there repairing everything and it takes time.

But what the hell are you supposed to do when the power goes out and it takes a few days to get turned back on? Well, spend $10,000 - $20,000 and install your own backup power. Is it inefficient? Sure! Does that matter? Absolutely not.