China Sees the Opportunity: It’s Australia

Every Battery manufacturer at SNEC wanted to talk about one market. Here’s why the world is watching Australia. 

In summary

• At SNEC 2026, the world’s biggest solar and storage trade show, every battery manufacturer wanted to talk about Australia, where the Cheaper Home Battery program has created the most dynamic storage market in the world.
• China’s manufacturers are positioning hard: publicly announced deals at the show exceeded 92 GWh, including a 1 GWh solar-and-storage agreement signed on the floor with an Australian distributor.
• Australia isn’t the only market they’re watching. Within SunWiz datasets, UK battery volumes have doubled in recent months, and the UK and Ireland are beating the seasonal cycle rather than riding it.

Last month I was in Shanghai for SNEC, the world’s biggest solar and storage trade show. More than 3,600 exhibitors, hundreds of thousands of attendees, and for the first time in the event’s history, energy storage occupied more exhibition halls than solar panels. Storage was the main event and Australia was the rock star.

Even though we know the data, I was genuinely surprised on that enormous floor, every battery manufacturer we met wanted to talk about one market: Australia.

With good reason. The Cheaper Home Battery program, which began in July 2025 with a discount of around 30% on installed battery systems, turned an already-growing storage market into the most dynamic in the world. Daily installation volumes jumped from roughly 200 batteries a day to more than 1,500, and average battery sizes doubled, because installers quickly realised the rebate structure and the economics of installation rewarded very large residential systems.

The government adjusted the program to correct for this, with new settings taking effect on 1 May. The weeks before the change saw a rush to install big systems while the old rates lasted, and the market has since corrected sharply. How sharply, and why the official data is yet to show it, is a story we’ll tell in our next post.

What struck me in Shanghai was how hungry the manufacturers were to read this market. The interest was intense, and so were the questions. Was the pre-change surge real? Is the correction structural, or a timing story? When do volumes come back? These were companies trying to understand a market that moves faster than the data most of them have access to.

Our answer: it’s a timing story. Customers who would have bought in May, June and July in an orderly market bought earlier instead. Underlying interest remains very strong; home batteries have reached the point of being barbecue conversation in Australia. The government has since expanded the program’s funding from $2.3 billion to an estimated $7.2 billion, targeting more than two million battery installations by 2030. We expect healthy volumes for the year ahead.

And here’s the thing: for China’s manufacturers, Australia has already delivered. Chinese brands accounted for over 70% of Australian home battery sales in 2024, according to our data, with names like Sungrow, BYD, GoodWe and Alpha ESS filling the rankings that Tesla once headed.

The rest of China’s manufacturers are positioning accordingly. Publicly announced deals at SNEC exceeded 92 GWh, and among them was a 1 GWh solar-and-storage agreement signed on the show floor with an Australian distributor. In conversation after conversation, the message was consistent: residential storage pipelines remain strong, and Australia sits at the top of the priority list. When the world’s manufacturing engine is working this hard to read your market, it pays to be the one holding the map.

Australia isn’t the only market running hot. Within our datasets, UK battery volumes are galloping ahead, and we’re seeing considerable growth across Europe, with the UK and Ireland beating the seasonal cycle rather than riding it (we’ll cover that data in depth soon). The manufacturers we met in Shanghai are watching those markets too, and often asked us about them in the same breath.

Never before has the vantage point SunWiz, built since 2009, been more relevant: independent, installation-level data, updated monthly, across Australia and now the UK, Ireland and South Africa through our Luminate platform. When markets move this fast, that’s the difference between reacting and preparing.