Solar Coaster Podcast (AUS)

#9 - Federal Battery Rebate Special with Aaron Jenkins from Ecovantage

• Supply Partners • Episode 9

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In this episode of the Solar Coaster Podcast (recorded 18th June 2025), we have a special edition ahead of the Cheaper Home Battery Program launching July 1st. To join us in breaking down this Federal Battery Rebate, Aaron Jenkins from Accredited Certificate Provider, Ecovantage. 

With the battery rebate program just weeks away from launch, the trio dives deep into how the scheme will work, common misconceptions, and opportunities for installers. Aaron shares insider perspective on how the rebate will be processed, what kind of documentation and compliance will be needed, and why there’s still a lot of uncertainty in the rollout.

The conversation covers key risks for installers like cashflow crunches from delayed payments, compliance headaches, and stock shortages. They also explore the opportunities the rebate will create, especially for early movers, and share practical advice on upskilling, stock forecasting, and setting realistic customer expectations. The episode wraps up with proactive steps installers should be taking now to ride the coming “battery coaster” as smoothly as possible.

Perfect for installers, retailers, and anyone in the Australian solar and storage sector wanting clarity on the federal battery rebate program.

ABOUT THE PODCAST:
Welcome to the Solar Coaster! A podcast for navigating through the ups and downs of the Australian Solar and Energy Industry. Hosted by the Supply Partners Technical team and joined by industry professionals each episode to help you turn chaos into stability. We'll be talking about solar, batteries, EVs, Electrification and much more, so sit back and enjoy the ride.


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Welcome to the Solar Coaster, a podcast about the ups and downs of the Australian solar industry, brought to you by the technical team at Supply Partners with host Wade Allen and technical guru Andrew Thomson. Okay. Welcome to the Solar Coaster podcast brought to you by Supply Partners. We are Australia's technical distributor that not only brings you high quality products, but also sales and technical training so that you can stay current and up to date and keep you in this cart and on the rails of the exciting ride known as the Australian Solar Industry. I'm your host, Wade Allen and with me as always, our in house technical guru and recently appointed product and technical manager Andrew Thomson at. How you doing, buddy? Ready to shake the rust? Good, yeah, thank you. Look, our podcast is called the Solar Coaster and has it been a solar coaster? So yeah, can't wait to delve into it. Indeed. It's been probably, what, six months since we've been in here. So we are definitely shaking the dust off these mics this morning. But we decided to come back in today because it's, it's a very, very important time. It's the middle of June, we're only a couple of weeks away from the federal Cheaper Home Battery program dropping and there's a lot of misinformation out there because it's been kind of dribs and drabs and we kind of want to set the record straight and make clear all the guidelines, the rules, the risks, the opportunities for all the solar installers out there in Australia. And who better to help us than one of the most knowledgeable of rebate and certificate aficionados in our industry, Aaron Jenkins from Ecovantage. Aaron, thank you for being here today. Thank you for having me, mate. This isn't your first time being on a Supply Partners program. We've had you on the webinar before. But it's your first time in studio and I know you live up in the sunny coast and it was probably a brisk traffic filled drive down here this morning. So thank you for making the journey to be here in studio. Maybe just give us a quick rundown on your background and that of EcoVantage as well. My background, I started off as a sparky, so been there, done that, done the installer out, went from there to Ecovantage and we are a Stivia creator, so. So whether it's STCs, LGCs, carbon credits, VEECs, ESCs, the recently deceased PRCs, as far as much of the solar industry is thinking of it, that's what we do. So if it's policy and if it's technical advice, that's what we do. Yeah, nice. And how long you been there? Coming on six years. Okay, fantastic. Well, I just want to hop right into it today because this cheaper home battery program, which is a bit of a misnomer because you can put it in businesses as well. As far as far as I can remember, the rebate is delivered through the expansion of the SRES, right? Yeah, correct. So is it going to work very similar to the way STCs are created for, for solar? Is there any differences? It should be very solar esque. It's going to be going through the SRES. Like you said, the government's agreed to buy the STCs via the clearing house. So ensuring that there's a stable supply to it, but there's still a fair few changes around it, there'll be numbers of jobs you can do, there'll be pricing, there'll be how long does it last? So it'll be an interesting one to watch and see it unfold. Now, there's been a bit of misinformation with the media saying, oh, it's $40 in STC, but we all know it's more like 37 and a half, 38. Right. Well what it ends up to, the consumer is going to depend on who's doing it. Right. So the government's buying them at $40, but in the middle you've gotta have your installers take the admin time, you've gotta have the software vendors create their software that can enable the claiming of these things. And with policy and guidelines only just coming out, they're gonna have to do that on the double. So that's not gonna be cheap. And then you've got businesses like us who actually need to get the evidence, go through it, comb it, approve it, lodge it and then at some point you gotta get paid and how fast you wanna get paid, it could be a slow process for the first few months. So if people wanna get their 48 hour STC payment, which a lot of the industry got hooked on over recent years, that's going to come at a cost. I do have a question. So you've been doing the STC claims for quite a long time now and I know that it's not been finalised, there is draft information out there, but when you said you're going to be combing through all the information, do you know anything specifically as to what you're going to be looking for? The solar panel stcs are just rock solid. Now, take your photos, do this, do that. Is there Anything that people need to know that's unique to the battery side. So if you go back last week, the CER released basically a bunch of screenshots from what they're saying. This is how you're going to upload it and you have to upload everything manually. And at the moment it's got lots of buckets that just say, show us proof that the installer's qualified, show us proof that the site's eligible. Show us proof that the battery's been installed. As per manufacturers, there's lots of declaration buckets, but what they're going to be looking for and how specifically they want you to prove that is still pretty ambiguous, to be honest. So it'll be like solar, but it's just going to have a few extra layers. There's also the auditing level, which they've kind of inferred and referred to, but again, no one actually knows. What's the order ratio going to be? Is it going to be super intense, like New South Wales was? You'd have to assume not, given it's this late in the game. But how's it going to go? Like, there is a risk there for the government bringing in a new program and they're going to want to monitor that. Yeah. But they haven't given us the exact explanation as to how they're going to do it yet. That's right. And I guess maybe a bit different to solar actually is a greater risk. Like, we know that the whole STC scheme and a lot of the kind of checks that they brought about were from some failed schemes in the past in other industries. Now, solar can be dangerous if not installed correctly, but battery, there is a greater risk. So I imagine they're probably going to want to increase the audit frequency. You would hope. Yeah. You could speculate that perhaps that's one of the reasons why there's no bulk upload for the next few months. They've told us that. So as an STC creator, we. We can't upload 50 jobs, 100 jobs at a time. We've got to do them one by one, so they're being received one by one on the other end. So you'd have to argue, perhaps there's some transparency in doing that that way. Yeah. And is there going to be, like, definite eligibility criteria for homeowners and businesses similar to STCs that were 100 kilowatt of PV? Right. So is the. There's same guidelines for the batteries. Yeah. So it's the SREs. Right. So the framework's very similar it's not so much. I know in the early days when it was announced, people were asking, well, how do I know if it's a small business or a. How do I know if this business is eligible? That business is not. It comes down to hardware installation, right? If there's over 100 kilowatt hours of storage, you're not going to get your battery STCs. If there is 99 kilowatt hours of storage, if we use the solar example, you're only going to receive 50 kilowatt hours of STCs. It's capped. And if it's a house, if it's your first dip at the go, how about it? So it comes down to what's installed and what's already on site. What if I already have batteries and I want to expand my system? Am I going to be eligible for the expanded amount? You should be eligible for expanded amount. But that's one of the things that we're drilling in on and going. We need some more guidance around it because then you start coming into what type of inverter configuration, what if you're stacking extra modular bricks on some of the systems that are out there? So at this point, there's still plenty of questions that we're asking and we're just combing through every update we can get to get details. One of the answers we received informally was the question of what if you need to install 150 kilowatt hours of storage? Can we. And let's say we're using a modular battery system like Sungrow, sbr, sbh, byd, anything stackable like that is, let's say that we put in 100 kilowatt hours of storage. We then claim our 50 kilowatt hours of battery rebate and then come and install the remaining 50 kilowatt hours tomorrow. Similar to what people are doing in the commercial solar space. They might do 100 kilowatt STC system, come back tomorrow and commission the next 100 kilowatt for LGCs. Are you able to comment on the eligibility of that? We've heard that it should be okay, but I guess we probably need better clarity. Yeah, we haven't got anything formula around that at this point. We're going, it's the SRES. So you'd assume, like you said with solar, it'd be in line with that where you got to prove that the intent was you were going to go with 100 kilowatt hours to start with. If there's another transaction shortly thereafter where everyone's happy and they choose to expand it. That happens all the time in SPV and there's no issues around it. Yeah. But again that this feels very rushed. Yes. Like we're less than two weeks away and there's some of these questions which are fairly big questions and will affect a lot of consumers. But there's no concrete guidance on it yet. Yeah. Okay. Another muddy area. Yeah. I want to talk about because it's sort of my bread and butter is off grid. So I know NMI numbers is how you determine how many. Like if you've already gotten your STCs for your home, is it just going to be address for off grid, do you reckon? Like how are we going to determine that you haven't already claimed on that property if there is no grid connection? Yeah, we're definitely getting into the you reckon area. But yeah, you'd have to start going down to consumers and addresses and also declarations around it because one of the issues that I've seen in off grid scenarios is sometimes you have multiple dwellings and multiple systems and how do you differentiate them between one another? So look, we're very much so going we need to walk before we can run in this place. And those kind of scenarios will be after once we start walking because it's going to get messy very quickly. And the similar to panels being CEC certified, I'd imagine the batteries also need. To be certified to be eligible installers. So that much is pretty consistent to solar. One thing I will touch on that maybe not everyone's considered but we as a distributor found this out very quickly is that the moment the government was voted in and we knew okay, this rebate is happening and there was more clarity released around eligibility, especially in the off grid space is we very quickly found that a battery that is not CEC approved is now effectively worthless. Very much so. Like there is no market in Australia for a non CEC approved panel. The same goes for batteries. So we're now quickly rushing around and making sure all of our manufacturers, all the batteries we offer are CEC approved because previously especially in the off grid space and even a lot of parts of Australia on grid CEC approval in a lot of cases was for best practice. That was it. So there's suddenly now a lot of batteries that are floating around that people are going to have to sell it near cost price just to be able to get them installed. So that's another joy that we deal with on the solar coaster. Yeah, that's the problem with short turnarounds. Right. If itwas announced in 6-12 months time people can run stock out, but at such an accelerated pace, like you said, that's the coaster. It's going to have ups and downs. Yeah. At least it's easy to get a CEC approval. Yeah. I know the WA rebate which was going to be 500 per kilowatt hour, and then they're like, oh, never mind, we'll just make it 130, stack it with the 370 and make it 500 total. The NT that their allocation recently ran out. Is there any other states that have a battery rebate where there's clarity around can we stack them or not stack them? Are they disappearing? Obviously New South Wales is the one that everyone's spoken about. No, you can't stack Best one with the battery STC program. They've increased their VPP connection certificates around that with Best 2. South Australia has a similar model to Best 2. Probably a little bit easier if I'm honest, for VPP connections but not for battery rebates as such. And then after that you start going into a couple of interest free loans here and there, but nothing. That's really what you call stacking. Yeah. Okay. And you mentioned vpp. I know one of the stipulations early on was that the battery needs to be able to be at least connected to a vpp. Is that still something? Yeah, VPP able but not VPP connected. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So in the New South Wales scheme, I know this is up in the air again, you probably don't have the answers, but we'll check with you. Is so ever since they announced that they're dropping Best one, but I believe they inflated the price for Best two. If you're in New South Wales, you take part in a vpp, you get paid X amount. Now the eligibility for that, where some people might get caught off guard is I believe it's up to 28 kilowatt hours, which conflicts with the 50 kilowatt hours for the federal battery rebate. But the question on everyone's mind is what are compatible VPPs? And even in some of the chats that we're in with industry leaders, even VPP companies can't advise who's eligible. So that's. Yeah, seems like a bit of a disaster. Yeah, look, it's a bit messy. New South Wales unfortunately has got a bit of a onus of you prove how it's going to work and you prove that it's eligible. South Australia, on the other hand, is much easier. This is an approved vpp. It's on a VPP list if you go onto that one. Yes, you get it. So hopefully they'll put a little bit of work into smoothing that out. The market will take some time to mature. Frustratingly, it was only just starting to mature with best one. Yeah. Before they shot it in the head. So yeah, we'll give it time and see. Now, is there going to be a limitation to how many systems you can sign off on in a day? Yes, that'll be a fun one. So it's two systems a day as it stands. And the thing to be careful of is they're calling a PV system one system and a best system one system. So you can do two batteries in a day or you can do a solar and a battery in a day. There is a grace period in July that the CER released recently saying that if they were already set up and disconnected as per their instructions, you can go up to four batteries in a day or you can do a new system and a couple of other pre existing ones. I think it was two. So they've got a bit of fluidity for July, but after that it's back to two systems a day. If you're an installer now, that seems quite fair. I'm not an installer. That seems quite fair. I think there's going to be some niche applications where it might not work. Perhaps there's a residential townhouse rollout where they've done cookie cutter mirror systems on each. They're all installed and they need to go and sign them off. That's going to be a long, drawn out pain. But apart from that, I think it should be fine. Yeah. And I think you look at it from the lens of they're trying to make sure that people aren't running around like crazy flicking switches and not thinking. Because you're creating an industry boom. Right. Everyone's talking about it's going to be a boom. We're trying to avoid a literal boom. So I can actually see the reasoning behind it. Yeah, sure. That's a great segue into my next question, which is surrounding risk. There's going to be obviously product risk, but more along the lines of business risks for the installers out there. Maybe stuff they're not thinking about. Should we. Let's just talk about what they should be doing to navigate through these risks as well. Not only about what we just talked about, the number of installs. You don't want to be going out there and signing off two PV and two battery systems and going, wait a minute, that's four systems. What are you talking about? So what are the other risks that, that you can see? I think to start with, there's going to be a decent cash flow risk. You've not only got businesses who have promised this rebate for the last couple of months and now it's coming. Couple that with the fact that they can only energize so many systems a day and then it's going to take longer to process. Like I said before, you can't bulk upload jobs. Everything's going to be audited manually. The compliance do's and don'ts are still somewhat gray. So you might have installed a job today and you think you do a good job. You might have to go back to site and get an extra photo in two weeks time. We just don't know. And all that's going to slow the process down and then how long on the other end it takes to get approved and registered as an STC. It was only what, 612 months ago that there was a huge backlog in STCs because certain market players hit the fan and there was a whole bunch of fun around that we could see the same thing again. It's not unimaginable. Couple that with systems maturing, like IT systems, and even just on our end, people learning how to audit to the new standards and to the new rules, it's going to take time. So if people are hooked on that 48 hour STC payment, that could be a serious risk for business and they assume they're going to get it. And assumptions often end up making an ass out of somebody. That could be one of the risks that we see and it's one of the ones I think we will see. And then also like we touched on before, if you're passing on $40 to the consumer, you want to do the right thing by them, you don't want to gouge them. And no one's encouraging that. But you need to acknowledge it's going to take time and resources for an installation business to create these paperwork, a trader to create it. And there's got to be a software vendor somewhere that gets paid to create the platform that we all use, otherwise why would they do it? So I think there is a bit of a risk there that the public has been educated that I'm getting$40 in STC, I should be getting X amount dollars per kilowatt hour. And when that doesn't happen, I think there is a bit of a risk of a misconception there. And unfortunately it's going to fall on the solar companies, largely to correct it. Sounds like there could be significant scheduling and delay problems for our customers as well. Like if they're, if they're planning on doing two installs per day per certified ticketed battery installer and there's going to have to be trips back and there's going to be delays in STC payments and all the. I can see this starting to stack up pretty fast and there being delays at like one of the biggest things that we've been talking about and that we, we sort of identified early on is the supply chain. Yeah, yeah. There's going to be some, some stock issues. Oh definitely. So there's, there's some stock issues already across the market. Not, not brand specific. And when people jump up and down about this, I very quickly point out that look, we're recording this in June now, even though we heard about this in April, it wasn't until the, the start of May, I think the first or the second week of May that the government actually got voted in. Now manufacturers weren't going to just fire up the manufacturing line, start pumping stock into Australia until that government got voted in. So we haven't seen the increase manufacturing even enter the Australian market yet. So look, once we get past this initial wave, which would be a bit crazy, ongoing stock forecasting with your suppliers still very, very important. But what we're going to see now and over the years we've had many manufacturers come and present to us and as they do everybody and they say here is our annual production capacity, here is our factories. A lot of that part of the kind of the manufacturer's introductions. Normally people kind of aren't too fazed about they glaze over. Show us the products. We're keen on the products now it's more important than ever. If you have a manufacturer that can produce 55 GWh of battery storage and the next manufacturer that has just as much demand in Australia can produce 6 gigawatt hours. I know which one's going to be a safer bet for my business as far as ongoing supply goes. So now those numbers actually do mean something and people should be paying attention. Absolutely, yeah. There's also another risk that we're seeing like when you talk about large amounts of hardware coming in, right, that means more installs occurring, which is good. But you've also got the fact that the other side of the STC equation, the solar STC market, that still exists and that is a market based mechanism. We've got the renewable power percentage rpp. I always get tongue twisted on saying it but that's 18% this year and that's kind of. That's lower than last year. It's fluctuating in and out of clearinghouse already. If we see 30% more solar going in as a result of bigger batteries or more batteries and solar happening, well, supply and demand, there's going to be an increase of those STCs. So I know of a few parties that have put some very long forward positions into the market to ensure that they can still get above $39 an STC. So STCs, whilst the battery STCs are underwritten by the Feds, at least for the foreseeable future, your solar STCS may not be. So it'll be interesting to see what happens in that space. Yeah, like I was seeing on the drive this morning as well. So not only are we going to see people who don't have solar at all getting solar in a battery, we already know that solar systems have increased in size. But more than anything, we're going to see a lot of systems being ripped off and replaced. Now, in a couple of months time, the residential solar panel standard format, it's going to be around 470, 475 watt. Now, a lot of people out there might have, even if they've maxed out their roof space, they might have 20 x200 watt panels, so then suddenly go to 20 x 470 watt panels. Inherently, there's going to be a lot of solar going in. It's going to be nuts. Yeah. And like I said, the risk that you have there is again, everyone's so used to quoting STCs. Oh, yeah, I'll get my 38 bucks or whatever the case is, the market could well be below that if a proper boom kicks off, which is good for all the renewable targets that we've got. But I think the solar industry is going to have to remember that it is a live market. Once again. It's been a while since the markets actually had to think about what the STC price is going to be like. If you go back 10 years ago, I remember it was up, it was down, you'd lose money, you'd make money. It was a proper day trading job. At some points that could happen again if things go a certain way. So just on that. So I think while we're on the topic of risk, I guess it's very, very clear that people should be very, very careful with the amount that they're claiming for battery and solar panel STCs. We understand it's an extremely competitive environment, but at the end of the day, you have to do what's lower risk for your business. Just like us, there are plenty of products out there that look amazing, are good on paper, but it's the risk that has stopped us from going down that path. So that's something they need to look at again. Early days, we gotta walk before we can run. But I know earlier on many years ago, some installers or some end users just opted to claim their own STCs. You know what, I'll wait, I'll get the full amount. I'll get the amount and they'll just pay the full amount to the installer. Is that something that EcoVantage and maybe others are going to be setting up for where if your homeowner wants to just claim them direct, it's certainly not. Something they're going to be starting off with because the administrative load of onboarding a whole bunch of extra payees for us is just there's no business case for it, to be frank. Yeah, but look, it may be something that you see occur again because in those volatile markets you do start to get people going. I'll take the risk myself. Don't hedge it for me. And your educated consumers may choose to do that. But I think for that situation to occur, we do need to start to see that, you know, the real spikes and troughs in the solar STC price. Yeah, but then again, you also got to remember I say solar stc, that's not accurate. You've also got hot water systems that affect that and heat pumps have had their own boom in recent years. So it'll be very interesting to see when markets collide exactly what does happen. Yeah, yeah, I know you said that the CER released last week their framework and I just want to just reiterate onto that a little bit and ask you a question around like compliance pitfalls and stuff that our installers might need to watch out for to ensure that they're actually going to be eligible for the rebate. Is there anything we could talk about surrounding the risk of that or do we not know enough yet? Look, there's not a lot that I can say around that yet. Like it was literally a couple pages of screenshots of a portal that doesn't exist yet. There wasn't a lot of commentary and details around. Was a really good start, gave everyone a good inclination of where we're going. But I think if you want to look at ways to de risk your certificate creation around that, it's partner up with someone who's going to keep you informed and know what you're doing. Keep your ear to the ground. Don't just run a million miles an hour, which will be easy if you're, you're an installer. You've got so much work in front of you right now, keeping your ear to the ground on policy and staying up to date, that kind of stuff. It's pretty dry and it's not your core business, but you're going to need to be across it because I'll eat my hat if there aren't updates and tweaks and amendments over the next few months as it goes live even and going, oh, actually we need this extra piece of information. Oh, that's not good enough. We need clarity on that. We can't rely on a declaration, we need a geotagged photo, etc. Whenever new programs are launched, there's inevitably refinements to it. And whenever something's rushed, you can kind of double the amount of refinements that are required. Just, just on that, I'd say look over the coming weeks and again, moving forward, we found. So we're a Smart Energy Council member. They've gotten us out of trouble on quite a few occasions, or, sorry, the industry out of trouble. Thanks for coming. Yeah, they've been very helpful. So that's been awesome during this time, taking part in the chat and getting live updates as they come through. I was also on your website yesterday and I saw that you've got kind of a news page where you seem to be posting regular updates with kind of intricate details. So it's probably worth people logging on there. And yeah, if, like, if you want to stay informed. Yeah, we've got a weekly newsletter which also covers market movements. So if you want to know what's going on with PRC pricing, if you're looking at your best two or your STCs, your LGCs, etc. Yeah, subscribe to that and that'll keep you in the know because they do move around a ton. Like if you look at PRCs, they were near enough to two bucks a month ago, now they're three. So that's 50% fluctuation. Now, obviously there's a huge policy announcement that triggered that, but in that situation, if you've quoted and sold jobs at two bucks a PRC, you're actually going to have a pretty good run as long as you get it installed in the next few weeks. Yeah. So, yeah, keeping on top of that can be the difference between losing money, making money, or just being caught in a very awkward position with the customer. Yeah, yeah. And I get a Lot of questions daily. Can we do this under the federal home rebate? Can we do that? Normally what I do is I just point them to, I forget the exact website. It's the DEE or DCCEEW. Yeah, yeah. Jump onto that website. They've got a good list of all of the relevant information. But just as importantly, if you scroll to the bottom of the page, there's another page that has additional information that talks about using inverters that have fallen off the CEC list. So if it's not on there, technically it's a gray area right now, but just refer to that website for anything that's known. Awesome. Well, let's, let's go to the opposite end of the rainbow. Out of the doom and gloom and into the bright sunny skies. There's going to be some amazing opportunities for everybody. Obviously, I mean the, the battery uptake is going to be, it's going to go from, you know, 15% to probably well over 80%. You know, I was recently in China last weekend with a very large company and they said for the first time in their business history, they sold more kilowatt hours last week than kilowatts. Yeah. Wow. So the opportunity with batteries, obviously that increases the deal value, that increases your revenue, your margin, all that's great, we all know that. But I think there's going to be some long term opportunities and things that sort of fall out of this. Like what do you see as the best, the greatest, not maybe not opportunity, but what do you see as the best long term advantage to this, this battery rebate? Well, I think if you looked at it, you have to say that the point is to stabilize the grid. Right. Like we've got crazy highs and lows and pricing at the moment the duck's more of a swan in some states. In Australia, like the neck in the afternoon just goes forever and you go from negative pricing to 5, $10 kilowatt hour. If we can protect consumers from that and get a lower average cost of energy, you'd have to argue that's a big part of what the whole policy is meant to be driving. But also you get a decent battery. All of a sudden when you charge a car or don't charge car, if you've got an EV becomes less of an issue. All of a sudden your demand charges. And everyone complained about, I've got a smart meter now, I've got demand charges on my bill. Well, let your battery sort that out. That's the point. You get enough storage. It's not a high risk approach to go on one of those fun VPPs that can make you good money because you just go, let half of it play and half of it take care of the household. Like when you've got extra capacity and when that capacity is affordable and feasible, which we were saying beforehand, you know, 12 kilowatt hours, roughly average battery size, that's going to become 20 in a heartbeat, for sure. I honestly, I think that once July 1st kicks off and once all of the initial round of STCs actually get processed and people have the data, I think it's going to be an almost instantaneous jump because again, all of the data we have on battery size now is not taking into account anything that's been claimed under this rebate. Because it hasn't happened yet. Yeah, I mean, we saw battery sizes jump up in New South Wales off the back of best one, and that was harder to access and less incentivizing. So give it some proper headwind, tailwind rather. And yeah, I can just let it go. So it is like the STCs where every year it's going to decrease, right? Correct, yeah. So the first, this next six months is where you're going to have the most rebate available. And so, you know, with, with solar and the rebate, like it was so great just for. I remember selling Solar in 2011 and people ask me the question, are you sure this is going to work? Like, that was 14 years ago. Now, nobody asks that question. They all know that it works. So there's probably still a little bit of education in the market of how a battery works and how I can take the most advantage of the battery. Not maybe not just for self consumption, maybe it is for peak demand reduction, especially in, in businesses and such. So I think just having that overall increase in front of mind, hey, batteries are here, they work. Here's a, here's a rebate for them. So I think the, the small commercial like that, 50 to 100 kilowatt hours is going to be a really great opportunity for people as well. Oh, absolutely. And in the commercial front, you've also got things like, well, how much is downtime worth to you? What happens if you've got 20 people in your office and they can't work? Well, you get a battery and all of a sudden you have to factor in some of those things. So if you look at Victoria, South Australia, in recent years, there's been some massive blackouts for serious amounts of time. If you could have kept trading through that, what would the opportunity have been to your business? Yeah, absolutely. It'll be really interesting to see that value stack of the battery come together. It's not just about self consumption. Yeah. And the$2.3 billion rebate, at least that's what they've allocated for for now, you know, we did the math and if you take 20, 25 kilowatt hour average size and divide that into the rebate, It's. It's about 300,000 systems. That's not a lot. How many solar systems are there? Like 4 million or something like that? I think 300,000 solar systems went in last year, wasn't it? Just last year? So, yeah. So it's a year's worth of solar systems if everyone puts a battery on with it. So it'll look. That's one of the things that'll be very interesting to watch and see what happens because 2.4 billion is a big number until you start letting the solar industry have at it. What are your thoughts? So I had this question yesterday and a customer asked, there's only X amount budgeted. Yeah. Is it going to run out? What happens when it runs out? Now, look, no one knows, I assume, but because it is going till 2030, we can only best assume they will just top it up at some point. You've got three or four options. Right. Top it up. Now, depending on the pace of the industry, that could be a very expensive policy and it's going to be in the political realm. So someone's going to weaponize that, you know that. But that's an option. Then you've got let an STC be an STC and just go, let the market take it. They might be worth 20 bucks one day, they might be worth 30 bucks the next. Just open season. The government says, well, I'll buy 10% of it and anything else, let the market decide what they're worth. Yeah. Third option is shut it down, I guess so. No, like I said, no one knows what's going to happen, but they're kind of the three headline acts that you've got. So. So I guess if they did go for the, the second option that you put forward and just put it out onto the open market and as you mentioned before, with the amount of solar going in there could just be this, that many certificates created and out there that could ultimately bring the value down. Now combine that with all of these battery certificates, I guess. Yeah. Maybe just as. Just as bad as running out is, all of a sudden the value of it drops to a quarter of it. So that could catch people out. Obviously there's a long way to go until we get to that point. But just things to be mindful of. If you're quoting jobs that are six months, if you like, who knows. Some companies have very long pipelines so. We'Re in the commercial space. A six month pipeline isn't unrealistic. No, no, dead right. Yeah. We also have, obviously Australia is a blip on the radar of the world capacity but you know there, there is going to be an overall world uptake in batteries happening. So that economy of scale, we're going to have a drop in price. Like right now they're you know, 5, 550 a kilowatt hour. You can, I can easily see this coming down to like probably 300, 250. So it may do what it needs to do anyways. And the break even point might be the same. It's like solar was a buck 40, 15 years ago. That's the thing with solar is that like a few years ago and look, companies still market this way. Maybe it's smart marketing. Whether it's wrong or right is a quick sign up before the new year because the rebates dropping true, accurate. But as we found solar, and this is the whole point of the SEC scheme, solar panels have been dropping in pricing that I've found for the last two to three years. When it's ticked over to January 1, the sell price on solar systems has not changed. So it has done exactly that. And that's what they're hoping to achieve with on the battery front. So and look, if you get to that space, maybe a $20 STC will be enough. Right. If you've got cheaper batteries, cheaper solar panels, it's going to be a watch on white. Yeah, yeah. As long as it makes sense for the end user to purchase it from a return on investment, then happy days. Doesn't matter where it comes from or if you imagine in that cost or a rebate. And with quarter of a million more batteries out there depending on their size, someone you know, 300k, like you said, there's gonna be a lot more educated consumers as well. So that market confidence of knowing what they're buying and doing, that'll be pretty close to the job done. Now at I want you to touch on what we were talking about the other day and we were talking about yeah, you do get one kick at the can at this, you only get one rebate. So obviously go big or go home kind of thing. But there's other, you know, opportunities and there's other reasons and benefits to having a bigger battery. You Want to touch on a couple of those? Yeah, that's right. I've seen a couple of scenarios where either a, the homeowner has, has gone to an installation company saying I'd like a quote on a 10 kilowatt hour battery please, or the, the installer, the solar retailer has, has done what they do best and designed a system that they believe the customer needs. And Maybe that's a 10 kilowatt hour battery. Now something that I've been trying to sway people towards, installers, friends, family, is just see what a bigger battery looks like. As, as we know, most batteries are modular. Now let's say, let's. If we're looking at a Sungrow sbr, the most commonly sold battery stack size battery stack was 9.6 kilowatt hour. Right now that's three modules on a single phase system most commonly sold in Australia. You can go up to six of those battery modules. Now whether you are connecting three battery modules or six battery modules in the stack, it is no extra work, it's a few extra minutes, just like clicking in some extra Lego pieces. Now I've spoken to installers, they don't typically charge extra labor, they don't typically factor in extra risk on those projects. Talking to someone the other day, they said whether there's three modules in a stack or six modules in a stack, we don't calculate any extra risk there because it's highly unlikely that that's going to increase, increase our risk to have to return to site. So I just say to them, say, look, okay, if your installation costs aren't going to increase, even if you or the customer thinks they just need a 10, just see what a 19.2 kilowatt hour battery system looks like and then they put it across. And one customer I was talking to the other day, he put it forward to the customer, instantly accepted it. He then tried it with the next customer, instantly accepted it. And where this kind of formed from, my view is my dad is one of the most frugal people I've ever come across. Like, ridiculous. I was in high school earning like $8 an hour and I had to buy my own bed. Like, very frugal. That gives you an idea. Now, when the battery rebate was announced, he smartly installed a hybrid inverter. I said, look, if you're going to do solar, at least get a hybrid inverter to add a battery down the track. You don't need one now, but, but you will. And he did that. So that, that was awesome. Now the moment they announced the battery rebate. He got an email from the company that installed his system. Hey, federal battery rebate available. Here's what it looks like if you go and pair a Sungrow battery with, with your inverter because that's what he put in. And they said a 9.6 kilowatt hour battery. Here's the normal price, here's the price after rebate, here's the 19.2 kilowatt hour battery. And then here it is after rebate forwarded onto me son, like we want to, we want to go ahead with this like is this a good deal? And I'm like, no actually like that's, that's well and truly overpriced. Like they've inflated that price ridiculously. Now was it smart from their side? Yeah, definitely. Because no one knew much about the battery rebate at that stage. So that company was just being safe. But it just really shows you in the mind of the consumer it seemed like a good deal. They were ready to pull the trigger on it. So that's, that's, that's how consumers think it was a good deal. Actually it wasn't, but they thought they were saving a lot. So, so one. Okay, so the few reasons why you want to put the larger battery forward again just, Sorry, got off topic a bit but okay. So we were Talking about before VPPs energy, wholesale energy market trading. That's, that's going to be awesome. In Australia. Sorry, in Queensland I've seen there's some quite significant peak events. One of our, one of the guys in the business, he made $200 while he took his wife out to dinner over I think one to two hour. Period just only minus a hundred dollars for the. Yeah, yeah. Paid for dinner. And, and we always say like look, if you're going to go down that path, have some battery for you as you said, and some battery for the market. So if you need a 10 kilowatt hour battery then great. The other tens for the market. So that's, that's option one. Option two, which no one really thinks about is warranty. Batteries now are warranted via throughput. So if you have a 9.6 kilowatt hour battery and you use 10 kilowatt hours every day, you're cycling that battery now, you're most likely there's a high chance and even more so if you're doing trading, you're going to reach that energy throughput much sooner than the actual 10, 10 year mark. So going a larger battery means you're going to extend your warranty Period, hopefully to the, to the ten year mark. But also hopefully treating that battery well, hopefully gives better longevity. So there's that aspect. What were some other ones? Power. Okay. Power outage. I really hope that if all these batteries are getting installed that people are actually taking the time to wire backup circuits. Almost every hybrid out there now actually every hybrid inverter has some form of backup capability, whether it's a circuit or full house. I went through Tropical Cyclone Alfred with having access to one PowerPoint and I tell you what, that, that was a life changer. We were able to run the fridge the whole time, charge phones. That was just enough. So at a bare minimum, do, do just a PowerPoint. At a bare minimum. Now look, a battery twice the size will get you through the evening for twice as long. So there's other benefits there. Yeah, absolutely. So look, it's not just about getting a bigger sale. There's actually a lot of benefits to the end consumer and that's what you need to get across. Yeah. And that, so that's a great sort of segue as well because. And a few things that you touched on. There are some things that installers out there should be taking into consideration. It's not just, hey, there's a rebate, take advantage of it. There are those other benefits and those should be great sale points for everybody. When you're sitting in front of your customers and the greatest opportunity is exactly what your dad just went through. It's going back to your existing customer base. We only got 300,000 battery installs potentially in this 2.4 billion that could get chewed up pretty quick and into those people. So I do want to talk about this as well because. And finish off with this topic. And that is what installers should be doing now to prepare for this. There's going to be so many people jumping into this rebate. You know the, the rebate cowboys that just, you know, they were a bus driver yesterday and now they're a battery installer today. So like literally on the other side of that wall is our RTO new energy training. And like how many people are usually in their at getting their battery ticket? Like three? Yeah, there's, it's standing room only in there today. So there's that many people getting their battery tickets now. And so what should be, should installers be doing right now, Aaron, like with, from your perspective, with compliance and everything, what should they be doing in order to take advantage of this as best they can? Like you said, get trained, figure out what's going on in the Market, like we're saying before, get your ear to the ground. There's going to be a lot of changes over the next at least three months, if not six. So make sure you've got some kind of secure channel to keeping up to date. Whether it's smart energy Council, working with someone like us, you guys keep your customers up to date. Like make sure you know what's going on, make sure you get trained and accredited because it's no longer a nice to have, it's a need to have shore up your pipelines, whether that be of your hardware or even potentially as your future PV STCs. Like make sure you know what you're gonna buy and be able to sell it. At this point that's really all you can do is just make sure you've got your basics covered. And then the other thing is you talked about, you know, going back to old customers, getting your pipeline ready and you know, do it the right way. Whether it's coincidence or not. There's also ACCC consultation that's opened up on unsolicited sales. So if you were planning on hitting the streets and just door knocking every single house you can come across and foot in the door until they sign, you know, the old cliche or telemarketing, you could be in hot water pretty soon. The way that that's worded and depending on how strictly that gets worded, that was brought in Victoria not long ago under the VEU program and the net was pretty wide the way it's been written. It even includes referrals. So make sure you lock down your pipeline and make sure you've got a strategy to get consumers that want to work with you and that there's no high pressure sales tactics because depending on the outcome of that consultation, you may be in a bit of an awkward situation and going, well, I've got everything sorted but I can't get my customers. Now being such a big player in the rebate and certificate creation market. Is there anything that installers can do with EcoVantage now to set themselves up with you guys? Yeah, set themselves up, get on board and get trained. Yeah, exactly. Just get in touch and figure out what you need and where you need to go. Another massive thing and we touched on earlier, but I'll go to at like what people should be doing as well is communicating with supply partners or, or whoever they buy gear off. But supply partners to, to work with us because we're doing this with quite a few customers. But I just want to mention it to, to work through their forecasts and have a, we have a stock lock program where we will work with you if getting your forecasts and make sure that there is stock for you because there's going to be a massive stock problem if you're just, if you purchase just in time, you're up shit creek come mid July guaranteed. Just, just to give you an idea, there are some volume retailers out there where their battery attachment rate since the rebate has been locked in is sitting somewhere like 97% like and these, these are high volume installers. So the ones who might struggle here are the smaller companies. The, the like the company that's doing the right thing. But you know what, they, they sell a job then they go and order the gear. They're the ones who might struggle through this time. So have those conversations and just while we're touching on those sorts of companies I think that another huge risk as well what people should be doing is look, we can't control what those companies that go and advertise on TV at ridiculously low prices. We can't control them. But what we can control is you like people who are listening and the reputable businesses out there. We just want to make sure there's going to be this mindset of a consumer I'm going to get a battery. I've spent a lot of money for it. Even after rebates, a lot of money that they're going to be fronting up and they'll still get that bill come through and it's not going to be a zero dollar bill. Feed in tariffs have dropped to almost zero in parts of Australia. $0.03 here in Queensland it's practically worthless now. Supply charges vary around the country but I think even here it's about $1.50 a day. You cannot export enough in majority of cases to offset that. So you will be getting a bill. Please set the consumers expectations realistically because if, if they're disappointed, not only they're going to potentially leave you a bad review, they're going to tell their friends and it's just going to hurt our cause which is one of the hardest things. Yeah, yeah. There's a, there's an entire industry level upskilling that needs to take place. Not just getting your battery ticket like new energy training does certified installer courses of course but we also do non electrician accredited courses for consultants and people in your business. It and they come with, they come with logos and all that great stuff that you get to put but you got to separate yourself when there's going to Be that many people bidding for these battery jobs, you have the ability to say, look, we've been here for a while. We're not just hopping in for this rebate and then going to jump out. We have all this accreditation. Everyone in our business is a certified consultant. They know what they're talking about. When you call us, we're going to be able to help you. Like I know I was going to ask you what you think the training programs that everyone should be doing. And you just said all of it. Yeah, yeah, we were advising mum and dad and a lot of the cases anyway, they don't know what they're talking about. So you're telling them to part with thousands of dollars of money, which isn't easy to come by these days. You need to give them the right advice. Like you said, if you're going out 9.6 kilowatt hour battery, you won't have a bill. Again, we know that's wrong. A perfect example. And again, just trying to upskill the salespeople. It's not enough just to know, here's the battery, here's the brand, here's how much. It stores little bits of information that even seasoned installers still get caught up on. For example, let's say a 9.6 kilowatt hour battery paired with a 10 kilowatt inverter. It might only be able to discharge it, 4.5 kilowatt as an example. What does that mean? It means that if someone's cooking dinner, they fire up the oven, maybe got the air fryer going, some other things, you're suddenly using more than 4.5. If they log into their app, they're going to be, hang on a sec, I've got a battery. Why am I bringing power in from the grid right now? So just trying to explain, I guess, the difference between storage, power output and that's another reason why sometimes going a larger battery is better. Because in a lot of cases, it does increase the power output. Just some more basic education. Yeah. The advice, Aaron, that you can give installers right now to exactly what AT is alluding to in effectively communicating to the end customer for expectations and how to ensure transparency and getting the point across on how these rebates. Could you give any advice there? Honestly? I think we've said it. Make sure you know what you're talking about. Make sure you do it with honesty and accuracy. If you go the extra mile, yeah, there's gonna be a lot of people looking for a lot of quotes. But like you were saying, Solar 10-15 years ago. Will this really work? That's gonna be a question that I think a lot of consumers are gonna. Ask, or at least how does it work? Yeah, yeah. More often than not, consumers will pay a little bit more if they can trust somebody. So you don't have to beat yourself over the head with your pricing. Just do the right thing by the consumer. Make sure they're educated and informed and that they're not going to leave you that zero star review afterwards saying, I still got a power bill despite spending all this money. You got to be in the business for the long run. Six months is going to be busy. It's going to be great. Six months for the industry, stressful but great. But you got to think beyond that. You do. So just following on from that, you raise a good point. Historically, now it's okay, so here's your 6.6 kilowatt of solar. Here's your 5 kilowatt inverter. It'll produce this much, you might export this much is how long it's going to take to pay itself off. And then people are just comparing on price, comparing on products. Now it actually pays to have that additional information. This battery will output this much. This will be able to back up your whole house. And this should be able to get you through a power outage for this long. Like it actually pays to have more knowledge because that is what will get a lot of these quotes across the line. Well, you're saying, like when you talk to friends and family, the advice you give them, for me, it's, have they looked at your load profile? Have they mentioned your load profile? Do they know if you work from home or if you're not there during the days, all that kind of stuff. And then if you're looking at a battery, do you want to cook and have the air con running at the same time? Because for my house, I know when I was looking at battery, that was something I had to look at and going, well, hang on, what happens if we're charging the car and it's hot so we've got the air con going, does that mean we can't cook? What does it mean? I have to pay? Because I don't want a bill. I'm cheap. I want to spend my money so I don't have to spend it again. I'm lucky with that. So, yeah, like, did your son have. To buy his own bed? No, that's a good option. I really should look into that. And I guess like extending it even further now is you're talking ev Chargers charging your car. Now, there's fully integrated systems now where you can actually have the EV charger from one manufacturer, the inverter and battery from the same, and you can set it because some people say, you know what, I don't want to discharge my solar battery to then feed its way into my car. Yeah. So having a fully integrated setup, you can actually prevent that in a lot of cases. So, yeah, definitely a lot more education needed. Yeah. And I want to touch on what you said about load profile, especially for commercial. Oh, yeah. Like if you want to separate yourself, you should be doing the feasibility modeling that we're currently doing for large C&I best systems. You should be doing that for 100 kilowatt hour too, because then at least you're looking like a professional in front of the customer saying, this is exactly how it's going to be used in your business. And demand charges are a huge portion. Like, it's not about kilowatt hours, it's about KVA in some cases, like if you're a mechanics workshop and you flick the lights on, the compressors on and the air con on all at the same time at 5am when you get there in the morning, the sun's not up and you're suddenly drawing, you know, the maximum peak you're going to do for the day for the next hour. If your battery can't keep up with that, you're not getting the full benefit of it. Yeah. And you can set that battery to make sure that it's full and ready. As long as you design it right, you'll be fine. Exactly. All right, well, that's probably a great place to finish off, unless you guys have anything else you want to add. No, I think that's very informative and hopeful. We can get this out as soon as possible. So it's, it's current and. Yeah. Watch this space. Watch the Ecovantage website for updates as this is all going to be changing and evolving over the next couple of weeks. Yeah. Is that the best place to get in touch with you through your website? Yeah. Go through the website. It'll ask you what you're interested in, tell it, and then one of our people pick up the phone call you. Perfect. All right, Aaron, thanks for being here and thanks for listening. Enjoy this solo coaster for the next six months. It's going to be fun. Thank you. Thanks.