A January 2026 change brought forward expiry dates for a large number of listed products. If your battery was listed under the 2018 Best Practice Guide, the re-listing work is real and the queue is long.
Two things happened to Clean Energy Council battery listings in the last year, and together they have created a re-listing workload that a lot of suppliers have not yet registered.
First, SA TS 5398:2025 was released in October 2025 as the successor to the 2018 Best Practice Guide. Second, in January 2026 expiry dates for a large number of listed products were brought forward to 31 December 2027 to force the transition.
If your battery is listed under the older pathway, that date applies to you, and the assessment queue is not short. This is worth checking today rather than in the second half of 2027.
Why listing is the commercial gate
A product must be on the relevant CEC approved list at the time of installation for small-scale technology certificates to be created under the SRES. That single requirement is why distributors and installers will not handle unlisted product, regardless of how good it is.
It flows further than STCs. The federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program requires the battery, the inverter and the modules all to be listed. State programs are built on the same lists. An expired listing does not just pause a rebate — it removes the product from the addressable market.
A distinction worth getting right
Installer and designer accreditation moved from the CEC to Solar Accreditation Australia in 2024. Product listing did not. In October 2024 the Clean Energy Regulator nominated the CEC as the product listing body for small-scale renewables under the SRES.
We mention this because the two are routinely conflated, and we have had more than one conversation that began with a supplier believing their listing obligation had moved somewhere else.
Inverters: two obligations, two bodies
For inverters there is a second requirement that sits entirely outside the CEC process. AS/NZS 4777.2:2020 Amendment 2:2024 has been mandatory for applications since 23 August 2025, and safety is assessed by JAS-ANZ accredited certification bodies or state electrical safety regulators.
Separately, the importer or manufacturer must be registered in the EESS database. That is an electrical safety obligation under state law, owed by the Responsible Supplier, and it has nothing to do with the CEC. We regularly see one done and the other assumed.
Why applications sit in the queue
Overwhelmingly because the submission is incomplete. A missing warranty document, installation manual, datasheet, test report or certificate is enough to stop the clock, and the clock does not restart where it stopped.
The assessment itself is a technical review. The queue in front of it is administrative. The single biggest lever any applicant has on total elapsed time is submitting a complete pack the first time — which is unglamorous advice, and also true.
What to do now
- Check the current expiry date on every listed product you rely on.
- For batteries listed under the Best Practice Guide, establish what SA TS 5398:2025 will require and where the gaps are.
- For inverters, confirm both the AS/NZS 4777.2 Amendment 2 position and the EESS registration.
- Assemble the full document pack before starting an application, not during it.
Worth flagging on the horizon: the CEC has signalled CSIP-AUS certification and network onboarding as coming requirements. They are not listing prerequisites yet. Products being designed now should assume they will be.
Update, 10 September 2026: Amendment 1 to AS/NZS 4417.2, published 12 February 2026, moves battery energy storage system equipment to EESS Level 3 with a date of application of 12 February 2028. From that date a home battery needs a certificate of conformity and an EESS registration as well as its CEC listing. The same amendment does the same to EV chargers — we have written that up separately.
This article states the position as at 9 September 2026. Regulatory requirements change, and it is general information rather than advice on a specific product. We confirm the instrument and the standard edition in force at the time of each project.