Smart Energy 2026 Day 1: A Billionaire, a Group Hug, and an Illegal Battery

That Smart Energy 2026 Conference & Expo: Australia’s leading show that isn’t All Energy.

I’m filling in for our editor, Max, who has taken himself on holiday like someone who doesn’t understand the gravity of the Smart Energy Conference. Someone had to go. So I went to Sydney. Here’s what happened.

Andrew Forrest Opens With a Manifesto

Twiggy Forrest kicked off the day with the kind of keynote that makes you wonder whether you’re at an industry conference or a revivalist meeting. The man runs the world’s fourth-biggest iron ore miner and appears to be one of the world’s biggest advocates of solar, wind, batteries and smart grids.

He opened by calling for the end of the diesel rebate – a subsidy that benefits, among others, Fortescue itself. The rebate is about a thirtieth of Australia’s 18 biggest miners’ operating profits, so they’ll be fine.  The world’s most fossil-fuel-soaked industry, represented by its most famous executive, saying: “cut us off”.

His argument is simple and he makes it with genuine fiery passion. Net zero is a fiction built on offsets and creative accounting. Real zero means actually stopping the burning of fossil fuels and naming the date you’ll do it. He’s betting Fortescue’s future on it, he’s put a date on it: 2030, and he seems to enjoy the fact that this unnerves people.

The evidence he brought: Fortescue has built a giant green grid in the Pilbara with 1.2GW of solar capacity, more than 600MW of wind generation, and 5GWh of battery energy storage. The diesel burning mobile equipment is all going battery electric including electrified their 240-tonne dumper trucks. If you can run the biggest machines on earth on solar, wind, and batteries – the argument that heavy industry can’t go real zero collapses. These are a working machines in working mines.

He also said he expects the Strait of Hormuz to stay closed for the foreseeable future thanks to an unlimited supply of Iranian DIY drones making the whole exercise even more urgent. The miners relying on billions  of litres of diesel to run operations over the coming years are screwed.

He was full of energy and slightly terrifying and the typically anti-billionaire crowd was very happy to have him.

Chris Bowen: Victory Lap, Earned

The Energy Minister gave a speech that was notable for what it didn’t contain. No persuasion. No case being made for renewables. He walked in and read out a scoreboard to a room that already knew the score – and the crowd loved every number.

The shift he described seems structural:

• Gas at its lowest quarterly use since 1999
• Coal down 4% year on year
• Batteries setting wholesale electricity prices 32% of evening peak hours
• Renewables hitting 50% of generation in Q4 2025 – during the hottest summer on record – with zero reliability events

That last one shows the old attack line – renewables are unreliable – is as dead as Barnaby Joyce’s liver. The highest electricity-demand quarter in Australia’s history, and the lights stayed on. No load shedding required.

The EV numbers have the same shape. One in 50 new car sales were EVs in 2022. One in four today. Australians went from buying one EV every 50 minutes to one every three minutes in April 2026.

As for Bowen’s baby, the Cheaper Home Battery Scheme, AKA the battery rebate: 380,712 installed. Ten gigawatt hours of storage, in under a year. The program was expected to be popular. Even the optimists, Bowen included, were not expecting this. Australia now accounts for 10% of new battery capacity installed globally. We are not 10% of the world’s economy or population.

One stat he didn’t bring: how many of that 10 GWh are cheap, oversized, misconfigured 40-50kWh stacks with 5kW inverters that will almost never do a full cycle. If I had the balls I would have asked him about that. But I’d have probably got lynched by the adoring crowd. So I chickened out.

On the Iran crisis, he acknowledged the government had been scrambling to secure fuel supplies: 400 million extra litres of diesel, 100 million of jet fuel.  Interestingly, in the previous session, Twiggy had told us exactly how they had done that: by simply outbidding poorer nations who are likely going to really suffer as a result.

The audience deference was real and interesting. Politicians,  usually get a wary reception from industry crowds – they’re either asking for something or regulating something. But Bowen has just injected $7.2 billion into the industry he was addressing. When the minister who funded your industry’s decade-long ambition walks into the room and the program has worked, the vibe is going to be closer to a group hug than a Q&A.

The Expo Floor: What’s Hot, What’s Boringly Brilliant, and What’s Banned

The integrated battery stack is now the default.

Walk the floor and almost every storage brand is offering the battery and inverter as one stack. The old model – inverter here, battery there,  DC cables between (often unprotected & non-compliant) is becoming legacy. The exceptions were Fronius and Sungrow, who seem committed to keeping the inverter discrete. I’m genuinely not sure why. It may be a product roadmap thing, there may be a solid technical reason, or it may be stubbornness. Either way, they’re swimming against the tide.

ESY inverter and battery stack. One of the better looking budget stacks at the show.

Ecoflow battery and inverter stack. In the flesh it looked well-made.

Hinien battery and inverter stack with a daring two-tone colour scheme.

Canadian Solar Panels? Yes, please. Canadian Solar Battery? Yeah, nah.

The SAJ aesthetic. I’d love to know the school of industrial design this came from, so I never ever send my children there.

Solax. On show. With a cover missing. So lax.

Bluetti battery and inverter stack. This looks really well made IRL..

No, what? A badly installed Growatt? Or is the inverter meant to stick out like that?

Three Boring Things That Made Me Genuinely Excited

1. AC Solar Warehouse’s battery signage system.

This sounds boring because it is. But it is one of the most practically useful things I saw all day. The problem: battery installations require specific safety signage, and the current reality is a chaotic collection of stickers – wrong ones, faded ones, ones stuck to the battery instead of next to it, ones often with the wrong shutdown procedure for the model installed. This is the biggest cause of non-compliance on battery installs in Australia.

Compliant sticker plates for every brand. Brilliant.

AC Solar Warehouse has made custom, model-specific shutdown signs for every major battery brand. Rigid, professionally printed, screwed to the wall next to the battery. Correct information, correct format, looks like it belongs there. Great stuff.

Franklin nicely labelled.

A typical real-life Franklin installation with stickers. Compare the pair.

2. SolarMG’s OptiMount cable tray system.

I have a soft spot for cable tray and am not embarrassed about it. This is cable tray designed specifically for solar installs, and the details are right: overlapping fixing holes along the full 3m length for mounting flexibility, side knockouts every 200mm so you’re not drilling holes on a roof and leaving swarf that rusts through colourbond, feet designed for corrugated, Trimdek, and Spandek profiles, ZAM coating (zinc-aluminium-magnesium) for serious corrosion resistance, and DC warning markings imprinted directly on the lid for compliance. Small innovations, real-world time savings, cleaner installs. Brilliant.

Brilliantly designed cable tray for solar.

3. Noark’s Trinix switchboard.

Every breaker in this board measures power flow and reports it to monitoring software over WiFi. This is the kind of product that makes you realise how backwards we’ve been about energy efficiency. The industry’s instinct when someone has high bills is to throw a bigger battery at it.  The Trinix tells you where your energy is actually going, at circuit level, in real time. Every home should have one. We need to get serious about efficiency and monitoring again.

Every breaker is a wifi energy monitor.

The Most Exciting Thing Was Illegal

The Marstek Venus E 3.0 was the best thing I saw at Smart Energy 2026, and you cannot legally own one in Australia.

It’s a 5kWh home battery. 2.5kW output. And it plugs into a standard GPO. That’s it. No electrician, no switchboard work, no install cost. You plug it in, it charges, it discharges when you need it.

This is exactly what Australia’s 3 million renters need. No permission required from a landlord. No installation required. Charge it on your free solar hours. Use it at night. Take it with you when you move.

The reason it’s illegal is that Australian standards don’t yet recognise plug-in energy storage as a category. The safety pathway doesn’t exist. But they’re sold legally across much of Europe and the US for about AU$3,000.

Chris Bowen’s speech was a victory lap, and it was deserved. But if I were suggesting the next front, it would be this: create a pathway for plug-in battery storage. Fix the standards. Let renters participate in the energy transition they’re currently locked out of. The technology exists, it’s safe, and it’s sitting on a stand at the ICC in Sydney right now.

Smart Energy 2026 continues tomorrow. Max is still on holiday. I remain in Sydney. If anything exciting happens tomorrow I’ll write about it – otherwise I’ll have to publish Anthony banging on about conduit or stickers or Fox ESS cable covers.