One Australian household in three has solar on its roof, the country’s grid-scale solar installations now cover a land area of two to three Lake Macquaries, and the plan written by AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Operator, needs nearly three times today’s rooftop fleet and more than three times today’s grid batteries.

The Scale

Grid-scale solar operating	115 installations, 13,043 megawatts, an estimated 24 to 29 million panels on roughly 200 to 340 square kilometres. Lake Macquarie’s surface is 110 square kilometres.
What they generated	18.7 terawatt-hours in 2025, 1.3 Erarings, or 7.7 percent of the country’s electricity. Averaged over the year, the fleet runs at about a fifth of its rated power, because the sun sets.
Rooftops	4,501,887 systems, 30.3 gigawatts, an estimated 75 to 90 million panels covering about 150 square kilometres of roof. They generated 33.9 terawatt-hours in 2025, 2.4 Erarings, at an average of 14 percent of rated power.
Grid batteries	50 operating, 9,694 megawatts, holding 25,555 megawatt-hours: 2.6 hours at full power, or one hour of the East Coast grid at average demand, or 16 hours of Eraring’s output.
Being built	Nine solar farms, 2,551 megawatts; 21 more financed, 4,249 megawatts; 18 batteries, 3,765 megawatts holding 14,591 megawatt-hours.
Still required	The plan wants 33 gigawatts of grid batteries by 2030, 24 more than today, and rooftop solar rising from 30 to 87 gigawatts by 2050, about 5.5 million more roofs at today’s average system (estimate).
The cost	A 360 megawatt solar installation with a 150 megawatt battery approved in August 2026 carries a capital cost of $689.5 million. Origin’s first Eraring battery stage, 460 megawatts holding 1,070 megawatt-hours, was about $600 million. The CSIRO’s 2026 benchmark for a four-hour grid battery is $385 a kilowatt-hour. The home battery subsidy is now estimated at $7.2 billion.

What Is Operating

New South Wales holds the largest grid-scale solar fleet at 5,752 megawatts, then Queensland 4,344, Victoria 1,708, South Australia 675, Western Australia 611 and the Australian Capital Territory 32. The largest operating solar installation in the register is Wellington North in the Central West Orana zone, 300 megawatts at the connection point and 436 megawatts at the panels.

The rooftop fleet is the largest single generator in the country by capacity and by count. New systems now average 10.3 kilowatts. More than three-quarters of the subsidised home batteries have gone into outer suburbs and the regions. Home batteries reached 11.4 gigawatt-hours of storage by May 2026, and the Smart Energy Council put the total at 14 gigawatt-hours in August: already more than half the energy held by every grid battery in the country.

Fifty grid batteries operate: 2,717 megawatts in Queensland, 2,490 in New South Wales, 2,030 in Victoria, 1,360 in Western Australia and 1,097 in South Australia. The largest by power is Waratah Super Battery on the site of the old Munmorah coal station: rated 850 megawatts holding 1,680 megawatt-hours, it has run at 700 megawatts since June 2026 while a third transformer is installed, and 700 megawatts of it is contracted to protect the Sydney transmission lines rather than to trade. It sits on 13.8 hectares. What a big battery looks like: Origin’s Eraring battery, being built in four stages to 700 megawatts holding 3,160 megawatt-hours, covers more than 17 hectares with more than 2,000 battery enclosures and 180 kilometres of cabling. Its first stage began commercial operation in late 2025. Full, it would run at its rated power for four and a half hours.

The batteries’ record discharge, 3,759 megawatts on the evening of 26 June 2026, was about a sixth of the east-coast grid’s average demand.

What Is Being Built

The largest solar installation under construction is Turner River in Western Australia at 690 megawatts. In central Queensland, Smoky Creek and Guthrie’s Gap reached financial close on 20 May 2026: two installations of 300 megawatts each, 720 megawatts at the panels, with a 600 megawatt battery holding 2,400 megawatt-hours, across about 1,800 hectares of cleared land near Biloela, 90 percent of the output sold to Rio Tinto for 20 years. Their developer expects close to 2,500 gigawatt-hours a year, about a sixth of an Eraring.

What Is Approved or Proposed

The solar pipeline reads 88,722 megawatts. Seven development envelopes, among them a 35,000 megawatt concept in Western Australia and a 20,000 megawatt concept in the Northern Territory, account for 74,200 megawatts of it. Strip them out and 14,522 megawatts of real projects remain, slightly more than everything operating today. The battery pipeline reads 29,596 megawatts and 112,504 megawatt-hours across 97 projects. The largest proposed, Hillview in New South Wales, would hold 8,000 megawatt-hours, nearly a third of everything operating in the country.

What AEMO Says Is Still Required

For 2029-30 the plan needs 36 gigawatts of large-scale storage holding 473 gigawatt-hours: 18 gigawatts of batteries running under four hours, 15 gigawatts running four to 12 hours, and 2.5 gigawatts of deep storage holding 356 gigawatt-hours, nearly all of it Snowy 2.0. By 2050 it needs 35 gigawatts of four-to-12-hour storage and 5 gigawatts of deep storage, plus 87 gigawatts of rooftop solar. The Clean Energy Regulator’s last outlook was for 3 to 3.7 gigawatts of rooftop solar a year, and the government wants two million home batteries by 2030.

Reading the Numbers

A battery’s megawatts are how fast it can push power out, like the width of a tap. Its megawatt-hours are how much it holds, like the size of the tank. A 100 megawatt battery holding 400 megawatt-hours runs flat in four hours. The two are never added. Solar is quoted two ways: at the connection point (alternating current) and at the panels (direct current), which is always the larger. Rooftop solar is a separate fleet and is never added to the grid-scale installations. The CSIRO’s cost tables could not be read directly for this compilation; the $385 figure is as reported on the day of release.

Technical material prepared for To Save a Beach and removed from the manuscript for length. Figures are as at August 2026. Where a figure is an estimate, the assumption is stated.

Australia’s solar installations, rooftops and grid batteries