Home battery storage's breakout year: the 2025 data, and what Australia just proved.
Three numbers define 2025 for battery storage: 100, 108, and 400,000. Global additions broke 100 GW for the first time. The average pack price fell to a record US$108/kWh. And Australia installed 400,000 home batteries under a single federal subsidy in under a year. None of these are projections. All three already happened. Here is what the data says, and what it says about 2026.
Storage broke 100 GW. For the first time.
BloombergNEF counted 112 GW/307 GWh of new energy storage additions worldwide in 2025, up 48% on 2024 and the first year annual additions have passed the 100 GW mark. BNEF forecasts another 41% jump in 2026, to 158 GW/459 GWh, with annual additions climbing to 308 GW by 2036: a trajectory that implies roughly 2.9 TW/10.5 TWh of cumulative global storage capacity by then, up from around 270 GW today.
China and the United States between them accounted for close to 70% of everything installed in 2025. China alone added 61.1 GW/173.1 GWh (up 54% year on year); the US added 18 GW/54.6 GWh (up 46%). The rest of the growth is increasingly diversified, with gigawatt-hour-scale projects now under construction or commissioned in Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the Netherlands, Chile and the UK.
Where residential fitsThe smaller, faster-diversifying slice.
Utility-scale projects still dominate the global tally: roughly 85% of 2025's additions, by BNEF's count. Residential and commercial-and-industrial ("customer-sited") storage is the remaining, distributed minority, but BNEF expects it to grow to around a quarter of all global installations by 2030, driven by households wanting to use more of their own solar and to keep the lights on when the grid doesn't.
The global blend hides how different individual mature markets already look. In Germany, one of the world's most solar-saturated residential markets, 2.9 GW/5.8 GWh of the country's 3.8 GW/7.6 GWh in total 2025 storage additions were residential systems: roughly three-quarters of everything Germany installed. Where a market has been running long enough, residential storage stops being the minority case.
The price curveStationary storage is now the cheapest place to put a battery.
BNEF's 2025 Lithium-Ion Battery Price Survey, the longest-running dataset in this space, put the global average pack price (all segments) at US$108/kWh: down 8% on 2024 despite battery metal prices rising, and a 93% decline from the roughly US$1,474/kWh BNEF recorded in 2010. But the number that matters most for home batteries sits inside that headline: the stationary storage segment specifically fell to US$70/kWh, down 45% year on year, making it the cheapest battery-pack segment of any kind for the first time, cheaper than EV packs.
Source: BloombergNEF 2025 Lithium-Ion Battery Price Survey. China's domestic average pack price was lowest at US$84/kWh; North American and European prices ran 44% and 56% higher respectively, reflecting production location and import exposure rather than chemistry.
Cell manufacturing overcapacity, intense competition, and the continuing shift to LFP chemistry are the three forces BNEF credits for the fall. None of the three shows signs of reversing in 2026.
The case studyWhat a well-designed subsidy does in ten months.
If 2025 has a single headline story, it's Australia. SunWiz's 2026 Australian Battery Market Report recorded 221,000 residential battery systems installed in 2025, a threefold increase on 2024, delivering 4,790 MWh of new capacity and taking battery ownership to 4.6% of Australian homes. Average system sizes nearly doubled.
The catalyst was the federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program (CHBP), a point-of-sale rebate launched 1 July 2025. By May 2026, it alone had driven more than 400,000 home battery installations and 11.2 GWh of cumulative residential capacity: installations were running at roughly 2,000 batteries a day, and that 11.2 GWh was reported as matching everything added to Australia's utility-scale grid battery fleet over the same 12 months. In December 2025, the federal government expanded the program from an original $2.3 billion estimate to $7.2 billion over four years, targeting more than 2 million Australian households installing a battery by 2030 for an estimated 40 GWh of additional capacity.
Sources: SunWiz Battery Market Report Australia 2026; Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (Cheaper Home Batteries Program), current to May 2026.
The design detail worth watching: a rebate restructure that took effect 1 May 2026 shifted the subsidy to favour smaller systems, and the average installed battery size promptly fell from around 28 kWh to around 25 kWh. Subsidy design doesn't just change how many people buy a battery; it changes what they buy. A point-of-sale rebate that anyone can claim regardless of tax position, like CHBP, tends to move volume faster than a tax credit that only pays back people with enough tax liability to use it, and the parameters of the rebate itself steer the size of the system that gets installed.
The patternThe same handful of variables, everywhere batteries go mainstream.
Germany, the US, Australia and now emerging markets in Europe and Asia are different countries at different points on the same curve, and the same small set of variables keeps explaining the differences: how expensive grid electricity already is, how much a household can still earn exporting solar to the grid, how far the underlying battery cost curve has fallen, whether a subsidy exists and how it's structured, and how large the installed base of rooftop solar already is to retrofit onto. Germany's high retail prices and eroding feed-in tariff got it there first; the US's Inflation Reduction Act extended a federal tax credit to standalone batteries for the first time in 2022 and California's NEM 3.0 cut the value of exporting solar the following year; Australia's CHBP is the newest and, on the 2025 numbers, the fastest-acting of the three.
What to watch in 2026The road to a quarter of the global market.
BNEF's own forecast, 158 GW/459 GWh globally in 2026, is the number to hold every other 2026 storage headline against. For the residential segment specifically, the metric worth tracking is how fast customer-sited storage closes in on that 25%-by-2030 share, and whether other governments follow Australia's point-of-sale rebate design rather than the US's tax-credit model, given how differently the two appear to move volume. Deeper looks at the individual Germany and US markets, and the technology and VPP layer sitting on top of all of this, are next on our list.
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