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 May 2026.
Read the shape, not the last bar. From 840 systems in the scheme’s opening month, the run rate climbed unevenly through spring, dipped over January, then accelerated hard: February 1,019, March 1,289, April 1,640, roughly double the opening pace. May’s printed 350 is not a collapse; it is an artefact of a scheme rule that gives installers a year to lodge their certificates, which the Regulator states in the workbook itself. April’s figure will still rise too. 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 May 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 97,168 rooftop solar systems across the Hunter postcode set since 2001, with a combined rated capacity of about 690 megawatts, a power station’s worth of panels spread across a hundred thousand roofs. The ranking barely changes: 2320 leads solar too (8,247 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: eleven months of household installs, about 261 MWh, is roughly a twelfth 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.
Methodology
Figures are drawn directly from the Clean Energy Regulator’s SRES postcode data (the Capacity and Installations workbooks and the SGU-Battery sheets within them), published at cer.gov.au, files stamped “data as at 31/05/2026”, downloaded and summed by us on 18 July 2026. Solar figures are cumulative from 2001; battery figures run from 1 July 2025, when batteries first became eligible for small-scale technology certificates. Counts reflect certificates the Regulator has validated to date. Because installers have up to 12 months to create certificates, the most recent month or two in any series is understated and will revise upward in later releases; that is the Regulator’s own disclosed lag, stated in each workbook, not a reporting choice of ours. Postcode figures are as filed against the installation address. Our Hunter set: 2300; 2280 to 2287, 2289, 2290; 2318 to 2327; 2325 (Cessnock); 2330 (Singleton); 2333 (Muswellbrook); 2328, 2329 and 2334 to 2337. Postcodes 2331 and 2332 returned no rows in either workbook and are recorded as absent, not zero. We have not reconciled postcodes to local government area boundaries; area descriptions follow the standard postcode numbering only. Megawatt hour and megawatt totals are our sums of the Regulator’s per-postcode values, rounded to whole units.