Homeowner Blog

The Smart Export Guarantee (SEG) has now been in effect for over two years, since it came into law on January 1st 2020. It’s the mechanism to ensure solar PV owners are paid for the power they send to the grid, ending the policy void that existed since the Feed-in Tariff closed to new applicants in March 2019.

According to the SEG, energy suppliers with over 150,000 customers must offer an export tariff with a rate greater than zero. The SEG is available for customers with an MCS-certified renewable energy system under 5MW and a second generation smart meter.

With zero as the minimum, at the very least you can’t be charged for being relieved of excess solar power. However, suppliers don’t have to give you very much for it. So how much are they offering in practice?

We often get enquiries from people who already have solar panels installed on their roof, but are keen to increase the amount of renewable energy they can produce. This might be because they had a battery fitted, or maybe their consumption has gone up with a new heat pump or electric car.

So what steps are there to overcome if you want to add more solar panels to your existing system to try and reduce your electricity bills even further?

Our clients are often keen to see what happens during the installation process ahead of time. As the proud recipient of Tesla’s Performance Excellence award, we’re delighted to pull back the curtain and give you a behind-the-scenes look at a recent Tesla Powerwall installation.

In the old days of solar PV, after your system was fitted, the only way to know how much power you produced was from the generation meter ticking up each day, or reading the screen on the inverter.

As inverters got better and integrated with WiFi, they allowed you to track daily, monthly and yearly production figures using your phone or computer. Although, one thing that you could never be sure of is the total amount of PV energy consumed on site.

But times have changed, and there are now much better ways of monitoring solar export and self consumption.

If you’ve spent much time trying to find the best energy deal, you may have come across the term ‘time of use tariffs’. It’s more exciting than it sounds - if you’re interested in Britain’s evolving energy system.

Energy suppliers are falling over themselves to launch more innovative tariffs to tempt savvy customers. Just last week, Good Energy announced its ‘Zap Flash’ tariff, with free EV charging when there’s excess power on the grid. So how do these tariffs work, and why do they have the potential to change the grid forever?

We talk a lot about time of use tariffs, but now there’s a new kid on the block - type of use tariffs. The first of these has been announced by energy supplier OVO and is designed to reward EV owners with lower cost car charging.

We’re facing a winter like no other.

Likely confined to our homes, many of us will be concerned about rising bills from extra heating and electricity usage. But it’s not all doom and gloom. We’ve put together some practical tips for how to save on your energy bills over winter and investigated the impact of on site renewables in the colder months.

The rollout of smart meters is an important part of the energy revolution and transition to a clean electricity network. But if you’re generating your own electricity, how do smart meters and solar panels interact? Can you have smart meters with solar PV? You can - and it may make your life even easier.

Read on for more information on smart metering and Feed-in Tariffs, export tariffs and home batteries.

We’re often asked by our customers which is the best electricity tariff, especially when they’re investing in their own renewable energy systems. There are lots of energy suppliers, with prices varying by location and various contract commitments. But there are particular types of tariffs that we’d recommend looking at, depending on your circumstances:

The solar PV industry has faced a year of change in 2019, with more uncertainty lying ahead. First came the end of the Feed-in Tariff, the guaranteed payments for people generating solar energy. The 50% deemed Export Tariff for smaller systems ended at the same time and we’re still waiting to see what will fill the gap, to prevent customers with new solar systems from exporting excess electricity to the grid for free. (Don’t worry, this doesn’t impact people who installed their system before the final Feed-in Tariff deadline of 31st March 2019.) The current proposal from the government is the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG) - more on this below. As a final kick in the teeth to the industry, another threat to solar PV installation has resurfaced - a potential solar VAT rise on domestic systems from 5% to 20%.

So what does all this mean to you? Is solar PV still worth installing now, either as an extension to your existing system, or as a new system altogether, or should you wait? And what about a solar battery?