Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I thank my honourable friend for the question. Since 1 July, 256,630 Australian households have put in a cheaper home battery, and 1,941 of them have been in the electorate of Bonner. Only one of them's been visited by the Prime Minister and I and the member for Bonner, but 1,941 have put in a cheaper home battery, and that is 6.4 gigawatt hours. Now, interestingly, in terms of capacity, it took Australia 10 years to put in the first 6.4 gigawatt hours of home batteries and eight months to put in the second 6.4 gigawatt hours. That is a doubling of the capacity of home batteries under this government, and that is additional to the 9.4 gigawatt hours of large-scale energy that has been added since we came to office.

The honourable member for Bonner asked me why we should avoid going back to the policies of the past. It's a very well crafted question, because the plural is important—because we had 22 failed energy policies in the decade of those opposite. We saw 24 out of 28 coal-fired power stations announce their closure, with no plan to replace them, and all this led to four gigawatts leaving the grid and only one gigawatt coming on. And that led—

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