Australia has the highest rate of rooftop solar uptake in the world, and home batteries are now following suit. Australian governments have encouraged both technologies, largely through certificate schemes like the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme, funded by charges on household electricity bills, and, more recently, through programs funded from the federal budget, such as the Cheaper Home Batteries Program. With several of these schemes due to end in 2030, Energy Consumers Australia engaged SPR to examine who bears their cost now, how that cost might be shared more fairly, and what the next generation of home energy upgrade support and decarbonisation policy could look like.
Through a cohort analysis, we estimated the energy use and scheme contributions of ten household types in New South Wales and Queensland, from public housing tenants to wealthy homeowners with solar. This allowed us to examine how income, tenure and access to solar shape what households pay into these schemes, who benefits from them, and how that picture changes when costs are recovered through different funding mechanisms.
We also analysed international practice, looking at how comparable schemes are funded, the trade-off between technology-specific and technology-neutral design, how they target support to households, and how they protect consumers from rising costs. We applied a similar lens to Australia's support for electric vehicles, examining how it is funded, who it reaches and how it could better serve households currently left out.