Paul,

Let me explain what obviously went over your head. This wasn't a case of unexpectedly large numbers taking up the scheme but instead a case of a smallish number recognising that the government had screwed up and taking advantage of that.

The original idea was that people would get subsidised to buy 10kwh batteries. But the badly designed scheme meant that it was almost as cheap for the customers to buy the much more expensive 50kwh batteries with the government picking up the extra costs. So the consumers got a system they'd never be able to use, the installers got to oversell their product and the taxpayers was left holding the bag.

The government had this scheme that was supposed to run through to 2030 but, due to their usual screw-ups spent the entire budget in six months.

Now, to try to save face and cover up their errors, they do what they always do.... throw more taxpayer money at it.

So a scheme that was targeted to run for 5 years runs out of money within six months. Remember, these are the same bozos who think they know what our emissions are going to be in 2035 and then in 2050. They can't even work out what's going to happen in six months let alone a decade or a quarter-century.

But their faithful flying-monkeys will keep the faith if not their money.

The federal incentive, which offers a discount of roughly 30% (up to $372 per kWh) on the upfront cost of battery systems, has seen rapid adoption that significantly exceeded initial government and industry expectations. Approximately 163,016 Australian households have installed a solar battery as of December 2025, that's a 1,000 installations a day since July. FANTASTIC!

I'll do the calculation you won't (or can't).

Let's pretend the government figures are right and there were an extra 160,000 installations. The total budget was $2.5 Billion. (That's Billion, not Million - but what's a few zeros heh? Its only taxpayer money)

So $2.5billion divided by 160,000 mean each subsidised installation got over $15,000 each on average. And the subsidy was $375 per KwH.

So $15,000 divided by $375 mean each subsidised installation on average got a 40KwH battery.

But the average Australian home doesn't use or need anywhere near that capacity. So it was a massive waste caused by a hopelessly badly designed government boondoggle.

And now they are trying to convince the easily confused (no names mind you but Paul is in that cohort) that it was a great success instead of a great waste. If it was so good, why are they now suddenly changing the rules?

But the anxiously gullible will remain confused.

mhaze,

None of your commentary actually touches the claim being discussed: that most of the world has now empirically decoupled GDP growth from carbon emissions. The datasets behind this come from the Global Carbon Budget, national inventories, and the IEA - not from vibes, NGOs, or Guardian headlines.

You can dislike the ECIU’s funding all you like, but unless you can show that the underlying emissions and GDP figures are wrong, the funding point is just a deflection. The numbers exist independently of whoever happened to summarise them.

Your argument boils down to two points:

1. Economic growth requires energy.
2. Therefore emissions can’t decouple from GDP.

Point 1 is obvious. Point 2 simply doesn’t follow. Energy use and emissions are no longer welded together in the way they were 30–40 years ago. Countries are:

- Holding energy demand roughly steady while GDP rises
- Electrifying industry and transport
- Increasing the share of low-emissions energy
- Improving efficiency across buildings, vehicles, and manufacturing

Those trends produce exactly the pattern observed: rising output, falling emissions. That isn’t ideology. It’s accounting.

And none of this is contradicted by your battery digression. Even if every claim you made about the rebate scheme were true, it would still be irrelevant to whether the UK, Norway, Switzerland, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt and most advanced economies have grown their GDP while reducing territorial and consumption-based emissions.

If you want to challenge the decoupling evidence, you need to do one of the following:

- Show that the Global Carbon Budget figures are wrong
- Show that the GDP data is wrong
- Demonstrate that the emissions reductions are artefacts of outsourcing rather than real
- Present counter-examples at scale

So far, you’ve done none of these. You’ve offered a complaint about one Australian policy design and treated it as if it disproves global datasets.

If you want to discuss the actual evidence, I’m happy to. If not, the rest is just scenery.

JD,

You utterly missed my point. (I should put that phrase on one of my function keys since I seem to use it so often in regards to your posts).

My point was that economic growth is linked to energy growth not emissions growth. And criteria surrounding energy growth have changed in the last 5 decades. There has been a greater amount of renewables. But fossil fuels remain dominant. Even so, the efficiency of fossil fuel has continued to improve, as it has for the last 2 centuries. So emission levels fall primarily because fossil fuels are used more efficaciously and fewer emissions from them are required to create each unit of economic growth.

The point therefore is that the phenomena of falling emissions and rising economic output would have occurred and has occurred quite apart from the hysteria against CO2 or the lukewarm world-wide take up of renewables.

As to the batteries issue.... Paul raised it so not my battery digression. Do try to keep up.

mhaze,

No one has "missed" your point. We’ve heard it clearly. It just doesn’t do the work you think it does.

Yes, economic growth has historically tracked energy use, not emissions per se. That is uncontroversial. But your next step is where the argument fails: you assert that efficiency gains in fossil fuels alone would have delivered the observed decoupling regardless of climate policy or renewables.

The empirical record does not support that.

Efficiency improvements have been occurring for over a century, as you note. Yet for most of that time, emissions still rose with GDP, because efficiency gains were consistently outpaced by scale and demand. If fossil efficiency alone were sufficient to produce sustained absolute decoupling, we would have seen it long before the last two decades.

What changed in the past 30-40 years is not merely marginal efficiency, but:

- Structural electrification of economies
- Fuel switching away from coal in power generation
- Rapid growth in zero-emissions generation
- Regulatory pressure on high-carbon processes
- Saturation effects in mature economies

That combination is exactly why emissions flatten or fall while GDP rises. Efficiency is part of the story, but not the whole story, and certainly not independent of climate policy.

Your claim that this "would have occurred anyway" is an assertion, not a demonstration. To sustain it, you would need to show comparable absolute decoupling in economies without renewables uptake, fuel switching, or emissions constraints. Those examples are conspicuously absent.

As for renewables being "lukewarm": in electricity generation, they are now the marginal source of new capacity across most advanced economies. That matters more than fossil fuels remaining dominant in legacy stock.

On batteries, whether Paul raised it or not is beside the point. It still has no bearing on whether global decoupling exists, why it occurred, or what the data show.

So we’re back where we started. The phenomenon is real. The data are clear. And efficiency alone does not explain it.

If you think otherwise, show it - with evidence, not insistence.

Oh, and... Do try to keep up.