In a pre-recorded speech to the New Zealand Institute of Directors in Auckland on Friday, the chair of the Australian Climate Change Authority, Matt Kean, said recent conflict in the Middle East had underscored the need to bolster domestic energy security.

As well as reducing the impacts from climate change, he said the shifting worlds of technology and geopolitics had created a strong commercial motivation to transition off fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

“Energy security and climate security are increasingly two sides of the same coin,” Kean said.

“The more you can generate and store your own electrons, the less reliant you will be on molecules shipped in from afar.”

“And the more consumers large and small can generate and store their own electricity, the more they can enjoy the wonders of technological advances that benefit both their wallets and the world.”

Lessons from Australia

Australia still lags New Zealand when it comes to the share of electricity generated from renewable sources. The latest data from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) showed renewables accounted for 94.5% of all electricity generated in New Zealand in the March 2026 quarter. In Australia, renewables accounted for 39.5% of total generation in 2025.

However, Australian households have adopted solar and battery systems in far greater numbers than their New Zealand counterparts.

As Kean said, more than 40% of Australian homes, or around 4.3 million properties, had solar panels on their roofs.

In Tasmania, which has more comparable sunshine hours to New Zealand, roughly one-in-four homes had solar panels.

In New Zealand, meanwhile, Kean said the uptake rate was closer to one-in-20 households.

Australia has more generous government subsidies and incentive schemes in place for household and community solar projects, including the Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme.

In New Zealand, Budget 2026 provided $30 million to put solar panels on up to 500 schools, but there is no comparable government-backed household solar scheme.

Rapid expansion of battery storage 

In 2025, the Australian Government opened applications for the Cheaper Home Batteries Program, which provides a 30% discount on the cost of installing household battery storage systems. In December of that year, the Australian Government expanded the scheme from an initial estimate of A$2.3 billion to $7.2b over four years. More than 2 million Australians are expected to use the scheme to install a battery by 2030, delivering around 40 gigawatt hours of additional storage capacity.

Kean referred to the scheme in his speech, describing it as a huge success that had surprised even its most bullish advocates.

“More than a thousand batteries have been installed per day, and we won’t be too far short of 450,000 units going in before the first anniversary of the multi-year scheme is over,” he said.

The scheme was also incentivising households to buy bigger batteries, Kean added. While there was a multi-billion-dollar cost of providing the subsidy, the increase in distributed generation and storage would help authorities to avoid costly network and infrastructure upgrades.

“We’ve installed about 12 gigawatt-hours of storage in these 12 months,” Kean said.

“It’s not quite like for like, but that capacity is in the order of twice your Huntly power plant, or so your colleagues tell me.

“And about a quarter of households snapping up batteries are using the occasion to upgrade their solar systems so we are breaking monthly records of PV installations too.”

Lower costs for consumers

Australia was also installing much larger batteries. In the last year, Kean said utility-sized units had added about the same amount of storage as all the household batteries combined.

“That means the evening demand peak is being pushed back and is generally much lower," he said.

“As a result, expensive gas and coal plants are being used a lot less.”

Citing Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Kean said utility-scale batteries in the National Electricity Market saw their year-on-year revenues more than triple in the first quarter of 2026, while those earned by gas plant fell 23%.

“The resulting drop in overall wholesale power prices has, in turn, prompted regulators to cut the default retail market offer for millions of homes and small businesses by as much as 11% for the coming year.”

Carbon emissions intensity per megawatt-hour of power generation continued to set record lows, Kean said.

“Decarbonisation by design or default? We’ll take it either way."

“The benefits in terms of the cost of living, particularly for owners of those solar panels and batteries, will last for years.”

Mobile batteries becoming more common

Kean also pointed to the uptake in electric vehicle (EV) sales in Australia. EVs accounted for about a fifth of new car sales, he said.

“As more EV models pack the capacity to supply surplus energy to homes or to the grid, ‘power to the people’ will shift from activist slogan to the norm.”

EV sales fell sharply in New Zealand after the removal of the Clean Car Discount in December 2023. The scheme provided rebates to EV buyers, with part-funding coming from fees levied on higher-emitting vehicles.

Sales of EVs have increased in recent months, with dealers pointing to the impact of high petrol prices arising from the global oil shock caused by disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. There were 1,586 new EVs registered in New Zealand in May, representing 14.6% of all new vehicle registrations.