Extreme weather is placing greater strain on Australia’s power grids. In 2022, the record-breaking Northern Rivers floods blacked out almost 70,000 households. A powerful storm in 2024 cut electricity to more than half a million Victorians. In 2025, Cyclone Alfred left 320,000 homes without power.

Large-scale power outages often coincide with mass evacuations. During the Black Summer megafires, tens of thousands of people fled.

Extreme weather will become more common and more extreme as the climate changes. Traditional far-flung power grids are often vulnerable to disasters. Trees fall on power lines, torrential rains cause outages, and bushfires can melt transformers.

Electricity is essential for emergency services, medical clinics, evacuation centres and communications systems to function during these events. Maintaining a reliable supply is a challenge.

Tapping into Australia’s growing fleet of household batteries could solve this problem by supplying electricity at local scale for hours or days, even if the grid goes down. It will take work to make this a reality, but the payoff during disasters could well be worth it.

People usually use household batteries to cut their electricity bills. This works by storing excess solar energy during the day — or grid electricity when cheap — and using it later when prices are higher.

The number of household batteries........

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