Victorian Solar Battery Rebate Expansion

Solar Victoria CEO Stan Krpan announced on Friday residents in an additional 80 postcodes are now able to apply for the state’s Solar Homes battery rebate.

The Victorian Government’s residential solar energy storage incentive offers up to a $4,838 rebate on an battery system. It was originally only open to residents in one of 24 postcodes and uptake was slow. As we reported a couple of weeks ago, 67 out of the 200 available until the end of October were still available as at the 25th, and the first tranche of 200 rebates were released in July.

The expanded program now sees availability in 59 regional Victoria and 45 Melbourne postcodes.

The new areas targeted, including Melbourne’s western and northern suburbs, the outer-east and the south-eastern growth corridor, are those with high rates of population growth and rooftop solar penetration. The new postcodes were selected after consultation with Distributed Network Service Providers (DNSPs).

A list of the eligible postcodes and other information on the Victorian battery rebate can be found here.

It’s important to note that among the eligibility criteria, the battery incentive is not available to solar households that have already received a Solar Homes rebate.

As at early this morning, 450 of the 456 battery rebates were available and this allocation runs until the end of February 2020; with another 400 available in March next year. The program aims to see 10,000 battery systems installed over the 10 years the Solar Homes program is operating.

November 1 Solar Panel Rebate Release Update

According to the Solar Victoria website, 502 of the 4,524 solar panel rebates¹ from the November 1 release are still available as at early this morning. No doubt they’ll be snapped up today, but this is the longest a release has lasted since the rebooted program kicked off in July.

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UPDATE: Nov 6. – I’ve had to eat my words – there were still 156 rebates available as at 2.45pm today.
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The number of PV rebates scheduled in advance for the latest release was 3,250, so the additional 1,274 have likely come from expired applications from the previous allocation. It’s unsettling the number of expired applications has been increasing – an additional 1,058 rebates were made available in the October 16 release from expired applications and 750 in the release prior to that.

With a significant proportion of applicants not following through for whatever reasons, it would be interesting to know what those reasons are as the situation would be frustrating for solar buyers and businesses that miss out after a release is fully allocated.

You can learn more about the Victoria solar panel rebate here.