What the file says

The Clean Energy Regulator publishes the Clean Energy Council's approved battery list as a CSV. Read on 18 August 2026 it holds 3,526 rows, covering 3,522 distinct model numbers from 153 manufacturer accounts. Parsing the expiry column returns one date carrying 2,947 of those rows, 83.6 per cent of the list, across 102 manufacturer accounts and 106 brands: 31 December 2027. The remaining 579 rows expire earlier, the latest of them on 24 December 2027. No listing in the file expires after 31 December 2027.

Why almost every date is the same

Standards Australia published SA TS 5398:2025, Electrical Energy Storage Equipment: Safety Requirements, on 10 October 2025. The Clean Energy Council is using it to replace the Best Practice Guide that has assessed battery storage equipment since 2018.

The Council states that from 1 January 2026 it accepted applications under either document, and that batteries approved under the Best Practice Guide were given expiry dates no later than 31 December 2027, or their certificate expiry if that fell earlier. From 1 January 2027 it will accept applications only under SA TS 5398. On 31 December 2027 the remaining Best Practice Guide listings expire off the list. The Council has said that the January 2026 re-dating brought forward the expiry of more than 700 battery and inverter models; that count is stated on a different basis to the figures here, which are a direct count of battery rows in the current file, and the two are not reconciled.

What expiry does, and what it does not

The Council states that products expired from the approved lists are no longer eligible for installation under the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme, or some other government programs and network requirements.

That is a statement about program eligibility on a date. It is not a finding about a product's chemistry, safety, warranty or field performance. A battery already installed is unaffected when its model's listing lapses: expiry governs new installations. A listing supports eligibility under the named scheme on the date read, and establishes nothing else.

Reading it as an installer

The date that matters is the installation date, not the quote date. A model listed today with a 31 December 2027 expiry is eligible now, and may or may not be eligible in 2028, depending on whether its manufacturer relists it under the new specification. For work scheduled near the boundary the listing is the thing to check, and it is checked in the published file rather than in a brochure.

Reading it as a manufacturer

Applications under the Best Practice Guide close on 31 December 2026. A listing obtained under it before then still expires on 31 December 2027, which is what the file already shows: of the 2,947 rows on that date, 2,176 were approved during 2026, the most recent on 3 August 2026. That is a listing with under eighteen months to run.

The count that shows the migration

The file carries no column naming the specification a product was approved under, so the transition is not directly observable in the data. It has one visible signature. Under the Council's rule an approval under SA TS 5398 receives an expiry three years from the approval date, or the relevant certificate's expiry if that is earlier, so a listing surviving past 31 December 2027 can only have come through the new specification.

Today that count is zero. It is a clean monthly series measuring the pace of the migration, against a hard deadline, and the pre-transition baseline cannot be reconstructed after the fact.

The inverter file gives the count its scale. The Clean Energy Council brought battery and inverter expiry dates forward together in January 2026, and read on the same day, the published inverter list already carries 767 listings with expiries beyond 31 December 2027, from 77 manufacturer accounts, the furthest dated 31 December 2030. The battery list carries none. Whatever process renews an inverter listing past the re-dating is already producing listings; its battery equivalent has yet to produce one. The Approved Product Monitor retains dated source versions, so successive readings of this count are recoverable from here forward.