On Friday, the Andrews government fired the starting gun on what it promises will be an energy revolution for Victoria.

Under a Labor promise announced last month, the state will pick up the tab as an estimated 650,000 homes install solar panels on their roofs over the next 10 years.

The government hasn't even waited for an election mandate to start acting on its pledge to “put power back in the hands of Victorian households”.

The scheme opened on Friday and has been backdated to August 19, meaning anyone who bought solar panels on the basis of the Premier's grand promise will be able to recover half the cost.

The scheme means any household on an annual income of less than $180,000, with a home valued at less than $3 million, can apply to fledgling agency Solar Victoria for a rebate of up to $2225 on the installation of solar panels.

The solar pledge, costed at $1.24 billion, was just the first of a flood of renewables-focused promises and announcements the Andrews government has made in the lead-up to the state election on November 24.

There are $1000 rebates on offer for replacing an old solar hot water system with a new one.

Those who already have solar panels can apply for a 50 per cent rebate on the installation of a solar battery, capped at $4838.

New planning laws will also be gazetted, giving homeowners increased protection from neighbouring developments that threaten to overshadow their solar panels.

Meanwhile, more than 900 megawatts of new wind and solar energy was committed to this week when the results of Victoria’s first “reverse auction” for renewables was announced.

The reverse auction worked like this: months ago the government said it intended to deliver 650 megawatts of renewables into the energy grid, and asked industry to pitch its best proposals.

In the end it opted for 928 megawatts worth - backing the creation of three solar farms and three wind farms across the state.

The Cooks are neither a political nor an "eco-family". But, about a year after installing rooftop solar on their home in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs, the family of three now want a solar battery at home too.

Marc, Gemma and 18-month-old Mia live in Lyndhurst in the state seat of Cranbourne District. It is one of the most marginal seats in Victoria – and it is leading the state's uptake in rooftop solar.

Marc works in auto-repairs, Gemma works in real estate. They bought their first home about four years ago.

These are the people the Andrews government is betting on to deliver its re-election this November, with a string of high-profile announcements aimed at making the state Australia's leader in domestic-scale renewable energy.

It's a strategy that, for the Cooks at least, might just pay-off.

"We're actually looking at batteries right now but, with everything that's gone on this week, we thought: 'let's wait'," Mr Cook said.

The Cooks are waiting to see if a re-elected Labor government delivers on a promise made this week to pay homeowners with rooftop solar half the cost – up to $4838 – of installing batteries to store the solar energy they generate.

The Lyndhurst family began their switch to renewable energy shortly after having a baby. Needing more power to heat and cool a larger house and to meet the newborn's needs, the family watched their bills go "up, up and up".

Mrs Cook said the "turning point" was when their quarterly power bill hit about $1000.

"That was the trigger, I said, we have to do something about this," she said.

With an eye on the long-term, they paid a premium – about $8000 – for a local company to install a high-quality system.

"It’s not like we want to go off the grid completely, we’re not eco-people, but anything to bring the bills down, at end of the day, that's what it’s all about," Mr Cook said.

He said the family was maximising savings by changing their behaviour. Now they used the washing machine and dishwasher when the sun was shining.

During parts of spring, autumn and summer their quarterly bill was now about $150, Mrs Cook said.

But saving on power bills hadn't proved so easy in winter, when the sun goes down early.

Which meant the lure of a half-price battery, and a chance to power through the darker months, might snag Mr Cook's vote.

"I'm not Labor or conservative, I'm for whoever is offering the best for my area or for the country," he said.

Labor insiders were pretty pleased with themselves after the launch of their big solar policy.

The household subsidies scheme cleverly pushed two hot policy buttons: energy prices and the cost of living, while bolstering Labor’s environmental credentials.

Premier Daniel Andrews' slick policy announcement in Melbourne came as the Liberal Party in Canberra was tearing itself apart in a civil war that flared up over an attempt to finally bed down an energy and emissions policy.

The National Energy Guarantee was dumped and so was prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, after he failed to get the policy past a rump of climate sceptics in his party room, just as the Andrews government had warned.

So Labor's solar splash looked like clever politics, as it unveiled the rest of its plans for rooftop solar in the subsequent week: $60 million for solar hot water systems and $40 million for half-price battery storage.

But reviews for the policy itself were mixed, with one respected energy commentator, Grattan Institute director of energy Tony Wood, saying the solar battery rebates appeared to be a policy designed to buy votes, rather than fix an energy policy issue.

“Why should people who don’t have a roof, who live in an apartment or something, why should they, through their taxes, subsidise people who do have a roof,” Mr Wood said.

“If you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there are much cheaper ways to do that,” he said.

“You’ve got to plan this more carefully, you could end up with a real problem here, for example in the middle of the day there would be some suburbs where the electricity from the rooftops is more than it is needed and you end up with a very unstable power supply.

“I can see why politically this sounds good, but from a policy sense, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me at all.”

One prominent consumer group has also sounded an early warning that the enormous solar scheme has the potential to turn into another pink batts fiasco, in which shonky operators seek to exploit the initiative.

The Consumer Action Law Centre has advised community legal centres and financial counsellors to be alert to the potential for unscrupulous traders to take advantage, noting that unsolicited sales of solar panels are “particularly problematic ... in Victoria”.

“Solar retailers may take advantage of confusion to induce people to purchase solar panels using commercial ‘interest-free’ finance products, which are not provided by licensed credit providers and therefore not subject to consumer projections,” the centre said in a statement last month.

“This is particularly the case before July 1, 2019 when the government loans become available.”

Consumer Action warned that prior to the scheme it had seen multiple cases in which solar panels were sold with no affordability assessment having been made and people were signed up to unaffordable payment plans.

When the Hazelwood coal-fired power plant closed in March last year it took 1200 megawatts of energy capacity with it.

Household power bills jumped 16 per cent in Victoria and rose interstate as Hazelwood’s low-cost brown coal generation was replaced by higher cost black coal, gas, and hydro generation.

But predictions of widespread blackouts over summer without the ageing plant to lean on over the hottest days failed to come true.

The plant’s shutdown also cut Victoria’s greenhouse gas emissions by about 12 million tonnes in the next 12 months, putting the state well on its way to hitting the target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 15 to 20 per cent (below 2005 levels) by the year 2020.

The six new wind and solar plants the state government committed to last week, when built, will cover three quarters of Hazelwood's capacity.

Some energy analysts now predict this new energy capacity will hasten the demise of Yallourn, which has replaced Hazelwood as Victoria’s oldest coal-fired power plant.

Yallourn, which has an energy generating capacity of almost 1500 megawatts, is scheduled for closure in 2032.

But energy economist Bruce Mountain, head of the Victorian Energy Policy Centre, doubts the plant will still be running then, predicting it will increasingly struggle to compete on price.

“It’s going to be driven out of the market by rapidly expanding wind and solar,” he said.

Wind and solar power will become cheaper and more competitive than coal-fired power as it becomes more plentiful, while Yallourn’s owners will face more maintenance costs with the ageing plant, he said, as capacity gradually wanes.

Dr Mountain said the national energy market still relied on Yallourn as a reliable source of power but that energy storage would advance significantly between now and 2032.

Those projects will go most of the way to ensuring Victoria meets its renewable energy target of 40 per cent by 2025.

But only if Victoria still has a renewable energy target.

The Coalition has promised to scrap it if it wins the election on November 24.

Shadow energy minister David Southwick said that the target was a market distortion that ran the risk of pushing up power prices for consumers.

“We’re hearing that the cheapest source of energy right now is solar and wind and if that’s true then these projects should get up without a target,” Mr Southwick said.

“Ultimately the cheapest projects should win. We should be focused on price and not trying to create an energy policy through the lens of an environmental policy,” he said.

It's a stance that has drawn the ire of advocacy group Environment Victoria, which is aggressive about Victoria’s energy trajectory, arguing the closure of all three of Victoria’s remaining coal-fired power plants by 2030 is the best outcome.

In an analysis of the Victorian renewable energy target, the group says as many as 12,200 jobs are at risk if the Victorian renewable energy target is ripped up.

The group says the renewables industry requires more certainty about a pipeline of projects to encourage investment, not less.

It is calling on the state government to commit to delivering 1000 megawatts of new renewable energy capacity every year for the next five years, calculating that this would create hundreds of new jobs.

“Matthew Guy would be prudent to review his ideologically driven position on clean energy in light of this new modelling," said Mark Wakeham, CEO of Environment Victoria

The opposition, for its part, has not confirmed if it will continue with Labor's promise to provide half-price solar installation to 650,000 households.

But Mr Southwick said the government was muddying the waters between what was an election promise and what was government business, by starting the scheme before people have had a chance to vote for it.

"We will honour any contracts that have been signed, but this smacks of a rush job, and we fear we would be left with a huge mess to clean up," he said.