A new report from the Clean Energy Council (CEC) shows Australian homes and businesses installed 2.6 GW of new rooftop solar capacity during 2025, including 1.5 GW in the second half of the year, boosting the overall total to 28.3 GW.
The latest edition of the CEC’s half-yearly Rooftop Solar and Storage Report shows 139,080 rooftop PV units were installed in the six months to the end of December 2025 with total installations for the year reaching 254,664.
Rooftop solar’s contribution to total electricity generation also continued to climb, reaching 14.2% in the second half of the year, up from 13.4% in the same period the previous year.
CEC Chief Executive Jackie Trad labelled Australia’s rooftop PV uptake a “national triumph,” saying the combined capacity of the country’s small-scale solar now eclipses the country’s entire fleet of coal-fired generators, which total 22.5 GW.
“Our biggest power station now resides on the rooftops of more than 4.3 million households,” Trad said. “It not only leads our national renewables rollout but also leads the rest of the world on a per capita basis.”
While the overall tally climbed to 28.3 GW, rooftop solar installation volumes eased year on year, down 15% on 2024 when 300,375 PV systems were installed, a result the CEC suggested showed the market is reaching critical mass and a shift towards energy storage.
“This was the first time since 2020 that total annual rooftop PV installations did not surpass 300,000, suggesting we have now passed the peak of rooftop PV installations as consumers turn their demand towards small-scale batteries,” the report reads.
Trad said recent government home battery programs, including the federal government’s $7.3 billion (USD 5.14 billion) Cheaper Home Batteries program launched on 1 July, have “strapped a rocket” to Australia’s distributed energy storage sector.
“We’ve seen phenomenal uptake of home batteries in Australia, with installations more than doubling in the space of one year,” she said. “Australian households have installed as many home batteries in the six months to the end of last year as they did across the previous five years combined.”
A record-breaking 183,245 battery units were installed in the second half of 2025, a four-fold increase compared to the same period in 2024.
The six-monthly total is equivalent to 99% of sales made between 2020 and 2024 and took the total number of battery installations across Australian households to 454,753 as at the end of last year.
The CEC said the growth of the small-scale market has exceeded expectations with rooftop PV capacity now expected to surpass the Australian Energy Market Operator’s projections for 2030 by 1 GW.
According to AEMO’s 2024 Integrated System Plan, distributed PV is projected to reach 36.1 GW of capacity in the National Electricity Market (NEM) by 2029/30.
This projection required an annual rate of 2.5 GW of newly installed rooftop solar from 2023/24 onwards. Over the past five years, the NEM has installed an annual average of 2.7 GW of rooftop PV.
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