There are currently over 100 battery brands and roughly 200 inverter brands on the Clean Energy Council's approved products list. More than 2,500 individual products. That's a significant number of products that have met a compliance standard, and compliance matters.
Since the federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program launched in July 2025, more than 284,000 batteries have been installed in Australian homes in under ten months, representing over a 200% increase on all batteries installed in the country up until that point. The government has since expanded the program from its original $2.3 billion budget to an estimated $7.2 billion, with forecasts of more than 2 million Australians installing a battery by 2030. That is a remarkable volume of assets going into homes and businesses at speed.
But compliance and performance are different questions. The approved products list answers the first one. Nobody has really built a system to answer the second.
What does good actually mean for a battery? On day one it might mean capacity, efficiency, and a clean installation. In year three it means something different. Degradation curves, real-world cycle behaviour, how the system performs under the actual load profile of that specific site. In year seven it means something different again. Remaining useful life, second-life potential, whether the cells have been treated in a way that extends or shortens what's left in them.
Good is not a fixed state. It's a trajectory. And a trajectory requires data to understand.
The industry has made enormous progress in getting quality products to market efficiently. The challenge now is what happens after installation. Without independent, ongoing monitoring, everyone in the chain is making decisions based on incomplete information.
The installer responding to a customer concern has no way to know, without data, whether the issue warrants a site visit or a phone call. Over time that uncertainty is expensive in both directions. Unnecessary call-outs add up. Early warnings that go undetected add up more.
The wholesaler supporting a product range has limited visibility into how those products behave across real installations. Patterns that could inform better technical support remain invisible until customers start calling.
The end user sees what the manufacturer's app reports. Without an independent reference point, confidence in the system is largely a matter of trust rather than evidence.
The manufacturer who builds a genuinely good product has no mechanism to demonstrate that over time. A verified performance record changes that. It also changes what happens at end of life, which is where the circular economy argument becomes the most compelling of all.
A battery with a complete, verified data history is worth significantly more than one without. Its remaining useful life can be assessed accurately rather than guessed. Its cells can be evaluated for second-life applications with confidence. The difference between a battery retired at the conservative end of an assumed lifespan and one that continues into a second application, backed by real performance data, is both an economic and an environmental one. That's a genuinely circular outcome, and it only becomes possible when the data exists.
Now scale that up. Commercial and utility-scale batteries operate in an entirely different risk environment. Energy management systems, battery arbitrage, grid trading, demand response programs, virtual power plants. All of it is predicated on one assumption: that the battery will respond, at the capacity expected, whenever it is called on. The entire financial and operational model is built around that assumption.
When a degraded or underperforming cell goes undetected, the consequences don't stay local. An energy management system dispatching a battery that can't deliver its contracted capacity creates a gap. That gap has flow-on effects through trading positions, network commitments, and dispatch obligations. In a tightly optimised system, a single battery performing below its expected state is not an isolated event. It's a variable that ripples through every decision made downstream that relied on it being what it said it was.
The bigger the battery, the higher the stakes. And the higher the stakes, the more the gap between what a system reports about itself and what it actually does becomes a material risk, not just a performance question.
This is what PlainView is built to address. A battery-agnostic monitoring platform that sits independently of any manufacturer's software and records actual system behaviour across the full life of the asset. State of charge, temperature, cycle data, degradation trends. A continuous, independent record of what the system actually does, not what it is configured to report.
For an installer, it means better decisions about when to attend and when to wait. For a wholesaler, it means real-world performance data on the products they support. For a manufacturer, it's the evidence base that backs a warranty and, eventually, a second-life claim. For an operator running commercial storage, it's the independent verification layer that every trading and dispatch decision ultimately depends on. For a regulator overseeing a $7 billion program, it's the kind of field data that currently doesn't exist at scale.
Compliance sets the floor. Performance is everything above it. A battery with a verified record of how it has behaved is an asset with a provenance, a history, and a future that can be planned rather than assumed.
That's what good looks like over time. And with two million batteries forecast to be installed by 2030, it's a standard worth building toward now.