Author: Donna Wentworth

The federal government announced a tenfold increase to the cap for commercial solar rebates. The limit moves from 100 kW to 1 MW, opening the door for massive savings for commercial properties considering going green.

Commercial solar rebates in Australia have worked well for small systems for years. Larger roofs missed out. That gap has a name in the industry: the missing middle.

From 1 October 2026, subject to regulations, systems up to 1 MW can claim the same upfront discount smaller systems already get. The government estimates it cuts installation costs by around 20 per cent.

Here is what this article covers:

• What changed, and when it starts
• What the missing middle is, and why it happened
• What the discount is worth on a real system
• Which businesses can claim it
• What to do before 1 October

What changed with commercial solar rebates in Australia?

The Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES) sits behind the rebate. It has run since 2011. It creates certificates, called STCs, that your installer trades on your behalf and takes off the price up front.

Until now, the SRES stopped at 100 kW. Anything larger moved to a different certificate system that pays out slowly instead of up front.

That cap is lifting to 1 MW.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen announced the change at the National Press Club, framing it as a fix for a rebate that stopped short.

“We’re fixing that by expanding support to systems up to 1 MW, unlocking the potential of commercial rooftops and helping businesses cut power bills, invest in growth and create jobs.” 

The start date is expected to be 1 October 2026, subject to the regulations being in place. Nothing is locked in yet.

What is the missing middle in Australian solar?

Australia leads the world on rooftop solar at home. Residential solar sits at about 22 GW.

Business solar sits at about 5.6 GW. Most of that is systems under 100 kW.

Bowen put the gap plainly.

“One in three Australian homes have rooftop solar, but larger energy users have been locked out because the existing solar rebate only supports systems up to 100 kW.”

That is the missing middle. Not homes, not large solar farms, the factories, warehouses, packing sheds and shopping centres in between.

The 100 kW cap explains a lot of it. A big warehouse roof can hold far more than 100 kW. Going past the cap meant losing the upfront discount, so plenty of businesses built to just under it instead. 

The room to grow is large. Modelling from Nexa Advisory puts technical capacity on commercial and industrial rooftops at more than 63 GW. 

What are the expanded commercial solar rebates worth?

The government has published estimates for three system sizes.

• 250 kW. Around $68,000 off the install cost. A system this size produces about 345 MWh a year and could cut electricity costs by around $50,000 a year. Suits a medium sized retailer.
• 500 kW. Around $136,000 off the install cost. Enough to run a small manufacturing site.
• 850 kW. Produces about 1,173 MWh a year and could cut electricity costs by around $175,000 a year. Reported discount is around $230,000. 

Treat these as estimates, not quotes. The real value of an STC discount moves with the certificate price, your location and the deeming period. Actual bill savings depend on how much of that power you use on site rather than export.

Eligible systems are expected to keep a five year deeming period through to 31 December 2030. 

Which businesses can claim the commercial solar rebates?

The scheme is federal, so it applies the same way in NSW, the ACT and Queensland. Bowen named the sectors directly.

“This will help manufacturers, farmers, retailers, logistics centres, schools, hospitals and community organisations reduce energy costs, and it uses an existing, proven scheme meaning no new bureaucracy or red tape.”

Small business and farms. Packing sheds, cool rooms, irrigation pumps and workshops run hard through the middle of the day. That is the best match for solar, because the power gets used where it is made.

Mid-scale commercial and industrial. Manufacturing, logistics, cold storage and large retail sit in the 250 kW to 1 MW range. These are the sites the change was built for.

Schools, clubs and community facilities. Halls, pools and clubhouses have large roofs and tight budgets. Some may also be able to combine this discount with grant funding, such as the PDRS scheme.

Why has cost not been the only barrier?

Grid connection is the other one.

A commercial system needs approval from the local network before it can export. Business owners report waits running into months. A slow approval can stall a project long after the quote is signed.

The government has said it will also push for faster connection approvals on mid-scale solar, through targeted rule change requests. 

Network rules also decide what a system earns once it is connected, not just how quickly it gets switched on. We covered that in what the AEMC’s pricing proposal means for solar owners.

What should your business do before 1 October 2026?

Four things.

Look at your daytime use. Pull twelve months of interval data from your retailer. Solar pays best on sites drawing power between 9am and 4pm.

Get the roof checked. Age, orientation, sheet type and structure all decide what can go up there. Mounting matters more on a large commercial roof than most people expect, which is worth reading about solar racking works.

Design for a battery, even if you add it later. Solar covers the day. A battery covers the evening peak, when commercial tariffs bite hardest. SigenStack systems are designed to suit larger sites, and the federal battery rebate is a separate program with its own rules.

Use an SAA accredited installer. The Clean Energy Regulator suspended 21 solar companies from the SRES in the April to June 2026 quarter for compliance failures. A non-compliant install can cost you the discount.

Frequently asked questions

Read next: what the new PDRS rules mean for commercial batteries

Powering your home with your EV is now legal, but is it actually the right move? 

We will break down how it works, roughly how much it might cost and whether it’s the right option for you:

• What vehicle-to-home charging is, and how it differs from vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-load
• What a real V2H setup costs to buy and install in Australia right now
• How much you could actually save, and why two respected estimates disagree by a wide margin
• Whether the payback period makes sense for an average home in 2026
• What you can do today if you want cheaper EV charging, without the price tag

What is vehicle-to-home charging, and how does it work?

Vehicle-to-home charging, or V2H, lets your EV send power back into your house. A bidirectional charger sits between the car and your switchboard. It charges the EV’s battery from solar or cheap off-peak power during the day, then reverses the flow when you need it: overnight, during a blackout, or whenever grid power gets expensive.

V2H is one branch of a bigger family. Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) exports power to the grid itself, sometimes for a payment. Vehicle-to-load (V2L) is the simplest version, running individual appliances straight off the car with no home integration at all.

There’s also a hardware split worth knowing. Standard AC chargers rely on the EV’s own onboard inverter, and in most homes that means one-way only. DC chargers, like the SigenStor module, convert power externally through a direct DC-to-DC link that skips that onboard step. Sigenergy quotes efficiency above 97 percent on that link, with less energy wasted than a typical AC setup. It’s also what makes genuine V2H and V2G possible in the first place.

The regulatory blocker is gone. The national wiring standard, AS/NZS 4777.1:2024, now permits bidirectional charging across Australia. That’s a genuine milestone. It doesn’t mean every EV, or every household, is ready to use it.

How much does a vehicle-to-home charging setup cost in Australia?

Here’s where the excitement usually meets the invoice.

The SigenStor DC EV Charger, the true bidirectional option Lenergy installs, isn’t a standalone box. It only works as an add-on module to an existing or new SigenStor battery and inverter system, so the pricing below assumes that system is already part of the picture.

A full SigenStor system built from scratch, battery, inverter, backup gateway and charger together, still lands around $30,000 or more once everything’s included. Other bidirectional chargers are reaching the Australian market too. Wallbox’s Quasar 2 is DC and bidirectional but currently limited to 7.4kW and isn’t widely available here yet. Numbat and StarCharge have entered the market as well, though none currently match the SigenStor unit’s combination of power and confirmed compatibility.

For scale: a typical SigenStor home battery runs around 24kWh usable. Most EV batteries dwarf that, at 60 to 100kWh or more. That’s the appeal of V2H. It’s also why the hardware to manage all that energy safely doesn’t come cheap.

How much could vehicle-to-home charging actually save you?

This is where sources disagree, and by a lot.

Amber, the energy retailer running one of the country’s largest V2G trials, claims early adopters are cutting bills by 40 to 60 percent, with one EV in the trial potentially unlocking around $3,000 a year.

More conservative independent analysis puts the realistic ceiling closer to 30 percent, and frames that as a best case, not a guaranteed outcome. Outlier events do happen. One of Amber’s clients reports making $700 in a single afternoon. That’s a real result. It’s an outlier, not a Tuesday.

Does the payback math on vehicle-to-home charging actually work?

Run the numbers, and the honest answer for most households is: not yet.

Take a mid-range install at $15,000 fitted. Even at Amber’s higher savings claim of $3,000 a year, that’s a five-year payback, before finance costs or battery wear are factored in. At the more conservative 30 percent ceiling, payback stretches well past a decade for a lot of homes.

Then there’s compatibility and warranty risk, and both are real. Sigenergy has confirmed the SigenStor DC charger working for both charging and discharging on three EVs: the Volvo C40 Recharge, the BYD Atto 3, and the Ford F-150 Lightning, and only once the car’s firmware is updated to the tested version. Models like the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Ioniq 6, and Kia EV6 are expected to join, but weren’t confirmed at time of writing.

Ford’s F-150 Lightning remains the only one of those three with a manufacturer-confirmed warranty covering V2G/V2H use in Australia. Technically compatible and manufacturer-approved are two different things, and right now, most owners fall outside both.

Add in distributor network approval, which varies by area, and vehicle-to-home charging in 2026 sits closer to an early-adopter project than a mainstream upgrade. If backup power during outages is the real driver for you, [what happens during a blackout with solar] is worth reading before you spend $30,000 chasing it through your car.

What can you do today, without the $30,000 price tag?

Now, here’s the good part. You don’t need bidirectional discharge to charge your EV smarter, or cheaper.

The Sigenergy Sigen AC EV Charger handles the other half of the job well, and it’s available now. It’s a smart, solar-aware charger in 7kW, 11kW or 22kW models, suited to single-phase or three-phase homes. Choose 100% PV, Solar Boost, or Fast mode, depending on how quickly you need the car ready and how much sun is on the roof.

Paired with a Sigen Power Sensor, it manages your home’s load automatically through Dynamic Load Management, so charging the car never trips your supply, even with the oven, the aircon and the car all drawing power at once. You can also check usage through the [mySigen app, the same one used to manage your SigenStor battery], if you already have one.

It won’t run your house in a blackout. It will make sure your EV is charging from sunshine instead of the grid, which for most homes is the saving that actually shows up on the next bill.

Lenergy supplies and installs the Sigen AC EV Charger across NSW, the ACT and Queensland. Our SAA-accredited installers size it to your switchboard, your driving pattern and your existing solar, with a fixed, transparent quote before any work starts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Read next: [How Kim’s solar powers his EV for $50 a month]

We install one battery brand. Here’s why.

At Lenergy, we’ve chosen to partner with Sigenergy as a platinum installer. Right now, they’re the best home battery brand on the market, with cutting edge technology, the most advanced specs and unparalleled levels of safety. That’s why the SigenStor is the only home battery system we put into Australian homes, backed by Sigenergy’s own specs, independent safety certification, and what installers across the country are actually saying about the product.

Why we trust Sigenergy

All-in-one 5-in-1 design. The inverter, battery, EV DC charger and energy management system all sit in one unit. That matters because fewer separate components means less on-site work, fewer things that can go wrong at the joins, and one warranty point of contact instead of three.

2026 SolarQuotes Battery of the Year. Chosen by 600 installers in the SolarQuotes network, with the highest share of the vote of any brand surveyed. This matters because it’s the people who install these systems every day, across every brand on the market, saying which one they’d choose.

100% usable capacity. The 314Ah long-cycle-life cells run at full depth of discharge. Many batteries only let you use 90 to 95% of what you paid for. With Sigenergy, every kWh you pay for is a kWh you can actually use.

0ms backup switching. When the grid drops out, there’s no noticeable gap before the battery takes over, on single or three-phase systems. That’s the difference between a blackout you barely notice and one where the lights actually flicker off first.

IP66-rated, install-anywhere build. The system is rated for outdoor mounting in Australian heat, dust and humidity. That means it holds up to the conditions Australian homes actually deal with.

AI-managed energy via the mySigen app. The system automatically shifts between solar, battery and grid based on your tariff and usage. In a market with time-of-use pricing and feed-in tariffs, that automation is what turns a good battery into one that actually saves you money day to day.

Modular and stackable. Capacity can be added later without replacing the system. That protects the investment if your needs change, whether that’s a new EV, a home extension, or just wanting more storage down the track.

CEC-listed. SigenStor configurations appear on the Clean Energy Council’s approved product list. That matters because it underpins your eligibility for state and federal rebates. A battery that isn’t CEC-listed can cost you access to incentives, no matter how good the hardware is. 

Five-layer battery protection. Sigenergy builds five independent safeguards into every battery pack:

• Internal fire extinguisher. Automatically releases aerosol to neutralise flammable gases and suppress thermal runaway within four seconds.
• High-temperature resistant insulated pads. Line the inner walls of the pack to insulate and stop heat spreading to the outer shell.
• Aerogel insulated pads. Sit between individual cells to block heat transferring from one cell to the next.
• Decompression valves. Safely vent internal pressure if it reaches a critical threshold.
• Real-time temperature sensors. Seven sensors per module continuously track heat levels and catch problems early.

Built on top of the IP66 rating and 0ms failover already covered above, battery safety has been a real concern for Australian homeowners in recent years, so five independent layers of protection means you know that you are safe in the event of a fault.

Australia and New Zealand-specific warranty. 10 years on the battery, 10 years on the energy controller, 3 years on the EV charging module. A region-specific warranty, rather than a generic global document, means local support and parts availability behind the cover, not just a PDF.

Backed at scale. Sigenergy reports over 1,490 staff, roughly 40% in R&D, and more than 17,500 registered installers worldwide. For a product carrying a 10-year warranty, that scale is what gives you confidence the company will still be around, and still supporting the hardware, a decade from now.