Your Battery Discount Came With Protections. Were They Actually Delivered?

If you bought a home battery in Australia and received a discount through the Cheaper Home Batteries program, something important happened during that transaction — something that probably wasn't explained to you.

The discount you received wasn't free money. It was funded by additional Small-scale Technology Certificates (STCs), and those certificates could only legally be created if a specific set of conditions were met. Not vague best-practice suggestions. Legislated conditions, set out in Regulation 20ACA of the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Regulations 2001.

Those conditions exist to protect you. And in our experience supporting battery owners through Virtual Power Plant participation, they're often where things start to fall apart.

What the Law Actually Required

The government's consumer-facing guidance tells you to check that your retailer provided information about the value of your discount, your system warranty, and the anticipated payback period. That's a reasonable starting point — but it dramatically understates what the legislation actually demands.

Before those additional certificates could be created for your system, your battery retailer was required to provide you with written information about:

• The appropriate size of your battery relative to your solar panels
• The appropriate size of the inverter relative to both the battery and panels
• Your current and expected electricity needs
• Whether any additional equipment, software, or other technology would be required for you to participate in a Virtual Power Plant
• The expected performance of the battery within the warranty period
• Expected payback period, energy benefits, or cost savings
• Feed-in tariffs and export limits that apply to your system

And they were required to sign a statement that all of this information was true, correct, and complete.

That's not a nice-to-have checklist. That's the legal basis for the discount you received.

Where It Breaks Down

At Powston, we work with battery owners who want to participate in the energy market through our VPP. And a pattern has emerged: the support calls that take the longest, and the customers who are most likely to end up frustrated or seeking refunds, are overwhelmingly people whose systems weren't explained, designed, or implemented in line with what the legislation contemplated.

Here's a practical example. The legislation requires that your battery and inverter must be capable of connecting to external entities to respond to remote signals — that's the VPP-readiness requirement in Regulation 20ACA(5). In plain language, your system needs a reliable internet connection so that a VPP operator can communicate with your battery.

Now think about how that's typically delivered. The installer connects your battery to your home WiFi network during commissioning. It works on the day. The installer leaves.

Six months later, your modem dies. Your internet provider replaces it. The new modem has a different network name and password. Your battery silently drops offline. Nobody follows up. Nobody reconnects it. Your system is no longer VPP-ready — and you may not even know.

This is entirely foreseeable. Modems fail. They get replaced. ISPs change hardware. Passwords reset. Anyone who has worked in this industry for more than a year knows this happens routinely. The industry training materials even flag it — recommending that a hardwired ethernet connection should be included in the proposal wherever practical, precisely because WiFi introduces this kind of fragility.

For a vulnerable or older customer who isn't comfortable troubleshooting network settings, a WiFi-only installation with no follow-up plan isn't a VPP-ready system. It's a system that was VPP-ready for the length of time it took the installer to drive away.

The Documentation Gap

We've been considering whether to require customers to provide their 20ACA documentation before signing up to our VPP. Not as a barrier — as a quality check. Because the pattern is clear: when the legislated protections were actually delivered, the customer arrives with realistic expectations, a properly sized system, and an understanding of what VPP participation involves. When they weren't, we end up trying to reverse-engineer what was promised, what was installed, and why the two don't match.

The legislation created these consumer protections for exactly this reason. But if nobody downstream ever checks whether they were delivered, they exist only on paper.

Choosing the Right Energy Plan

This brings us to a broader point about how battery owners engage with the energy market.

Participating in a VPP means participating, to some degree, in the wholesale electricity market. And the wholesale market is not for everyone. That's not a criticism — it's a statement about how markets work.

A traditional retail electricity plan gives you a consistent, predictable price. You pay a margin to your retailer, and in exchange, they absorb the volatility. That margin is the cost of certainty. It's insurance — and insurance has genuine value, particularly if you don't want to think about electricity pricing on a daily or half-hourly basis.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing that certainty. For many households, it's the right call.

Where we see people get into difficulty is when they approach wholesale energy the way some people approach credit card sign-up bonuses. There's a cohort of consumers who are very good at jumping between promotional offers — churning through introductory rates, collecting frequent flyer points, and moving on before the standard terms kick in. It's a legitimate strategy for credit cards, because the downside is capped and the terms are transparent.

Wholesale energy doesn't work like that. The prices move in both directions, sometimes dramatically, and the complexity of the market means that short-term promotional thinking can lead to outcomes that are genuinely worse than a simple retail plan. If your instinct is to chase the best deal of the month and switch as soon as something shinier appears, wholesale energy trading through a VPP is probably not the right fit.

The customers who do well with VPP participation tend to be the ones who understand their system, understand the trade-offs, and take a longer-term view. And that understanding starts — or should start — at the point of sale, with the information the legislation says they should have received.

What We'd Like to See

This isn't about blaming installers. Most are doing their best in a market that moves fast and demands a lot. It's about recognising that the legislated consumer protections in Regulation 20ACA were designed to create a chain of accountability — from designer, to installer, to retailer, to the customer — and that chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

If you're a battery retailer or installer reading this: the documentation requirements in 20ACA aren't bureaucratic overhead. They're the foundation that makes everything downstream — including VPP participation, warranty claims, and customer satisfaction — actually work. A system that's properly designed, properly explained, and properly connected is a system that generates value for the customer for years. A system that was sold fast and installed faster generates support calls.

If you're a battery owner: you should have received written information covering all of the items listed above. If you didn't, or if you're not sure, it's worth asking your retailer for it. Not because you need it to switch on your lights — but because it's the information you need to make informed decisions about how to use your system going forward, including whether VPP participation makes sense for you.

And if you're considering a battery purchase: ask your retailer about every one of those points before you sign. Ask how your system will stay connected to the internet when your modem eventually gets replaced. Ask whether the system is sized for your actual usage or for the best-case scenario on the brochure. Ask what happens after the installer leaves.

Conclusion

The discount is the easy part. The value comes from everything that's supposed to happen around it.