Your MCS certificate should reach you within 30 days of your system being commissioned, and without it no supplier will pay you for exported electricity under the Smart Export Guarantee. That deadline sits with MCS rather than with your installer, and it applies to certified domestic installations across the UK. The month after commissioning is when the certificate, the grid paperwork and the export application all need to happen, and none of the three is automatic.
Spirit Energy's 695 kWp installation at Philip Dennis Foodservice in Oxfordshire, split across a distribution warehouse and a cold store, is projected to save the business more than £85,000 a year on electricity with a five year payback and an IRR above 23%. Cold storage suits solar unusually well because refrigeration runs continuously, so almost every unit generated is consumed on site rather than exported at a lower rate. Self-consumption, not roof orientation or panel efficiency, is what drives commercial solar returns.
Every solar and battery system comes down to three parts: the panels, the battery and the inverter. Everything else is cabling and optional extras. A typical UK home system with a battery costs somewhere between £9,000 and £14,000 at today's prices and usually pays for itself in around seven years, after which it carries on generating for decades, as the systems Spirit Energy installed in 2010 are still doing.
These nine mistakes account for most of the money lost on a UK solar and battery installation, and nearly all of them are made at the quotation stage rather than on the roof. The most expensive is fitting fewer panels to bring the price of a quote down, because the panels themselves are only around 5 to 10% of the total cost of the job. Spirit Energy has designed and installed these systems since 2010, and the same errors still turn up in the quotes homeowners bring in for a second opinion.
No UK hotel of ordinary density runs on solar power alone, and the reason is storeys rather than sunshine. Roof area per bedroom is the binding constraint: a two-storey country house hotel has twice the roof per bedroom of a four-storey city hotel, so it can cover roughly twice as much of its electricity. Realistic figures run from about a tenth of annual electricity on a tall urban building to about half on a low, sprawling site.
Across Spirit Energy's 23-site rollout for B&M Care Homes, internal rate of return ranges from 19 to 30 percent, and payback periods run from three to six years. That spread is not a sign of inconsistent work. It is what happens when the same design team and the same installation standard are applied to buildings that each have a different roof, a different daytime load, and a different grid connection.
For those who have their finger on the pulse of the solar energy market, it's becoming obvious that there is an increasing shift towards the manufacture and use of n-type solar from p-type panels in both commercial and domestic settings, to the point where the former now dominate. But why has this shift come about, and more fundamentally what is the difference between the two?
In the space of just a few years, the average panel we install on domestic projects has shot up from around 315W to at least 375W, with more and more residential modules breaking the 400W barrier.
This is down to a few factors, such as the widespread adoption of new, more efficient technologies, bigger cells and bigger modules:
When researching solar PV, you may have come across the phrase ‘tier 1 solar panels’. It’s used as a selling point by some manufacturers and installers to demonstrate the reliability of their products. But is that really the case?
