The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has monitored the electricity market since 2018. Its latest report, drawn from the billing data of retailers covering 89 per cent of residential customers across New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and south east Queensland, is the first to look hard at what home batteries are actually doing to bills. The headline is unambiguous, and it is the regulator’s, not ours.
The battery boom the numbers sit on
The savings are the product of a build-out. The report counts at least 402,700 battery installations across Australia between 1 July 2025 and 17 May 2026, the period the federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program has been running. In the four monitored regions, new residential battery installs roughly tripled in a year, from about 93,000 in the last quarter of 2024 to 262,400 in the last quarter of 2025. Households are also buying bigger: almost half of new installations now have a capacity over 28kWh, and household battery storage across the market has passed 6.7 gigawatt-hours, with another 11.2 gigawatt-hours in grid-scale batteries. Recent changes taper the subsidy for the largest batteries and extend the program, which the ACCC expects will slow the growth in very large systems while keeping total storage climbing.
Why the virtual power plant nearly doubles the saving
A battery on its own lets a household store cheap or self-generated power and use it when grid prices are high. A virtual power plant, or VPP, goes further: the retailer coordinates thousands of home batteries, drawing on them at peak times and paying the owner for the electricity and the service. That is why the two figures diverge so sharply, from a $329-to-$909 saving for solar and battery to $762-to-$1,093 for battery-plus-VPP. “Households that have invested in batteries are achieving significant savings, particularly when their battery is connected to a virtual power plant,” ACCC Commissioner Anna Brakey said. The trade-off is control: the customer hands the retailer the keys to the battery, which is where the regulator’s caution begins.
The savings are against a rising baseline
The comparison is to a “regular customer”, and that customer is not standing still. Residential quarterly bills rose between 18 and 22 per cent across NSW, Victoria and South Australia in the September quarter of 2025 against a year earlier, on higher usage and higher prices. Government rebates masked much of it: strip out the Energy Bill Relief Fund and bills still rose between 6 per cent in Victoria and 15 per cent in NSW. So the battery saving is not money in hand so much as a growing gap between two trajectories, one where the bill keeps climbing and one where the household has taken a large share of it off the table.
The warning attached to the good news
The report’s second half is about who protects the buyer. The ACCC recorded a 107 per cent rise in consumer reports about “consumer energy resources”, its term for solar, batteries and the like, over the year, against a 181 per cent rise in battery installations, and notes that complaints tend to lag installs because problems surface later. Energy ombudsman schemes, fair-trading offices and electrical-safety regulators have all seen the same climb since July 2025. Commissioner Brakey named the gap plainly: the industry’s own New Energy Tech Consumer Code “addresses some of the issues identified in this report, but its benefits are limited by factors such as no independent dispute resolution or appeal process, reliance on self-reported audits for compliance, and lack of transparency around breaches”. Her conclusion is the line to hold onto before signing a VPP contract: “As more Australians invest in batteries and participate in virtual power plants, it’s critical that consumer protections keep pace.” The ACCC says it will keep monitoring complaints and use the Australian Consumer Law where it can against installers, retailers and suppliers.
Sources
- Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Inquiry into the National Electricity Market, June 2026 report (PDF), published 10 July 2026: the median-bill savings ($329–$909 for solar and battery, $762–$1,093 for battery-plus-VPP), the 402,700 installations (1 July 2025 to 17 May 2026), the 93,000-to-262,400 quarterly rise, the over-28kWh and 6.7GWh/11.2GWh storage figures, the 18–22 per cent (and 6–15 per cent ex-rebate) bill rises, and the 107 per cent rise in consumer reports.
- ACCC, Growing home battery uptake delivering lower electricity bills, but consumer protections needed (media release, 10 July 2026): the quotes from ACCC Commissioner Anna Brakey on the savings, on the New Energy Tech Consumer Code’s limits, and on consumer protections keeping pace.
Methodology. Every figure is from the ACCC’s June 2026 report, read in full; the report draws residential pricing from retailers covering 89 per cent of customers and virtual-power-plant data from 13 retailers and 4 new energy services providers. Savings are median annual bills for each group versus regular customers, a range across the four regions, excluding Energy Bill Relief Fund rebates. Quotes are reproduced from the ACCC’s media release of the same day. The Cheaper Home Batteries Program figures are the report’s, cross-referenced with our own coverage of the program’s capacity tiers.
See something wrong? Request a correction and we will check it against the sources and log the outcome here.