Thirteen months, 11,905 home batteries: the Hunter’s install data, postcode by postcode

Updated 18 August 2026 to the Regulator’s current file. This page first ran on 18 July from data current to 31 May 2026. It now carries the edition stamped 31 July 2026: thirteen months instead of eleven, 11,905 battery systems instead of 10,072, and 98,707 rooftop solar systems instead of 97,168. Both charts were regenerated from the new workbooks by .jez/scripts/build-postcode-page-charts.py, which was written for this refresh and control-tested by reproducing the original hand-placed bars exactly before it was trusted with new numbers. The earlier figures have not been quietly overwritten: the months that changed, and by how much, are set out in the paragraph under the first chart.

The Clean Energy Regulator publishes, monthly, a workbook that answers a question estate agents and electricians get asked constantly: how much solar and how many batteries are actually going in, street by street. We downloaded the full capacity and installations workbooks, summed the rows for the Hunter’s postcodes, from Newcastle’s 2300 through the Lake Macquarie 2280s, the Maitland-area 2320s, Cessnock, Singleton and Muswellbrook to the Upper Hunter’s 2330s, and this is what the Regulator’s own numbers show.

Validated battery installations per month, summed across the Hunter postcode set listed in the methodology note. Source: Clean Energy Regulator SRES postcode data, installations workbook, SGU-Battery sheet, data as at 31 July 2026.

Read the shape, not the last bar. From 842 systems in the scheme’s opening month, the run rate climbed unevenly through spring, dipped over January, then accelerated hard: February 1,038, March 1,341, April 1,851, roughly double the opening pace. The last two bars are not a collapse; they are an artefact of a scheme rule that gives installers a year to lodge their certificates, which the Regulator states in the workbook itself. We can now show that rather than assert it. When this page first ran, May printed 350 and we flagged it as provisional. On the Regulator’s current file May is 684 and June, which printed 420 in the edition after that, is now 779. April has risen too, from 1,640 to 1,851. July’s 411 is the newest bar and will move the same way. The honest reading is that the boom was, as of the most complete recent months, still building.

Validated battery installations by postcode, 1 July 2025 to 31 July 2026. Source: Clean Energy Regulator SRES postcode data, installations workbook, SGU-Battery sheet.

Twenty-five years of solar underneath it

The battery wave is landing on a region that already electrified its rooftops. The same workbooks count 98,707 rooftop solar systems across the Hunter postcode set since 2001, with a combined rated capacity of about 704 megawatts, a power station’s worth of panels spread across a hundred thousand roofs. The ranking barely changes: 2320 leads solar too (8,346 systems), followed by 2287, 2285, 2324 and Cessnock’s 2325. Whatever is driving Maitland’s lead, growth corridor, new estates, roof stock, it has now topped both technologies’ tables, and it is a question we intend to put numbers to in a future piece.

For scale against the grid-size projects this masthead covers: thirteen months of household installs, about 309 MWh, is roughly a tenth of the storage Origin is building in the Eraring battery alone. The distributed fleet is not the biggest battery in the region; it is the one that shows up in ten thousand separate driveways, and the market operator’s quarterly data already records the combined effect: daytime demand hollowing out, storage soaking up the solar middle of the day.