What is Solar Together?

Solar Together is a group buying scheme - the idea being that several hundred householders place one order “together”, i.e. they buy in bulk, with the idea of getting a better price than if each householder ordered solar on their own.

Solar Together is owned by a Dutch company called iChoosr, and the schemes are actively promoted by local councils - to the tune of £1million in London - so that the councils can show that they have taken positive steps to hit their net zero targets.

Note that neither Solar Together nor the local council have any legal responsibility whatsoever for the quality of the installation - your contract is only with the installer.

Letters go out to local residents who express their interest by giving some brief details of their roof and electricity usage. Solar Together then collates over 300 houses and invites bidders to install all these roofs.

And… the lowest price wins.

And that’s where the problems start.

Solar is an investment decision. It’s not about buying the cheapest system, it’s about buying the system that gives the best financial, or carbon, return. You have to be confident that you’re getting a system designed and installed by an experienced company that will do a high-quality installation that won’t have any issues. You also need to choose an installer that will be around for 25 years to offer support.

When Spirit Energy designs a solar system, we spend a lot of our time optimising the system to give the maximum return possible for the roof. We take into account the size of the roof, the shading, the orientation, how much electricity you use, and which components will give the best performance and warranty for the money.

See our case study where I documented my client’s entire solar journey from enquiry to installation. It’s a great example of the technical work that we put into every system we install.

We also invest time getting to understand all the latest solar panels and inverters as soon as they are released because solar technology is improving all the time.

Now, if you want to win a job by simply quoting the lowest price, you could just specify the smallest system that looked reasonable - but that would make a nonsense of the whole thing, so Solar Together have put some minimum requirements in their contract with installers to ensure that doesn’t happen.

But here’s what that independent report paid for by the GLA says. “Some elements of the PV solar equipment specified by iChoosr are lower than would typically be expected of a domestic rooftop solar PV specification, which will have likely contributed to some of the cost reduction.”

The report then lists 13 discrepancies compared to what would typically be expected of a domestic rooftop solar PV specification including: “Minimum solar panel efficiency is stated to be 18.1%”. This is lower than the 22% efficiency that you’ll find in modern solar panels.

The report summarises by saying “In particular, the installation of lower quality inverters will have reduced cost. The consequence of this decision by iChoosr may be increased warranty claims and complaints in the future.”

The report also says: “An anonymous installer involved in the Solar Together scheme outside London raised concerns with the quality of equipment that would be required to result in a successful bid for the work due to the low costs.”

And that’s the point. Because the solar together scheme simply goes to the lowest bidder, the easiest way you can win the bid is to specify the smallest system using the cheapest components with the shortest warranties that you can make fit the minimum requirements that solar together have specified.

Solar Together themselves make money from every system that’s installed, so they are also incentivised to make those systems as cheap as possible.

Now, normally if you’re getting solar then you’d probably get at least three quotes, and if one quote is very cheap then you’d want to understand why. But possibly, and I’m speculating here, when a customer gets a quote that’s been endorsed by their local council, and when they feel they are part of a group buying scheme involving many of their neighbours… they may make the assumption that they don’t need to do their own due diligence.

The Installer Selection Scheme

Let’s move onto the next problem with Solar Together. This arises from the selection procedure of the installer. When you’re picking one installer to install over 300 systems, it’s obviously crucial that you pick the highest quality installer to do the job.

And of course, it’s going to be very important to any council that is going to endorse Solar Together that iChoosr make a very careful choice as to which installers are allowed to take part in the bidding.

And yet the report from the Greater London Authority says “iChoosr has not disclosed the minimum score required for supplier pre-qualification, making it impossible to evaluate the set quality standards or determine if the quality threshold was appropriate.” Which makes you wonder why the council would endorse such a scheme before demanding that very basic level of information.

There’s an article in the Guardian from March 2023, which refers to the problems caused when one of the three installers chosen for the scheme began to go bust. The article says, “Green Energy Together Ltd was the only winning bidder for contracts in London in 2021 and, despite 385 complaints to the GLA about poor service, it was chosen again by iChoosr in 2022.”

This is what the report for the GLA says: “IChoosr ignored red flags highlighted by the Renewable Energy Consumer Code (RECC) and proceeded regardless with the appointment of Green Energy Together Ltd,” And this is why the urgent report was required in the first place - because Green Energy Technology went bust before they finished the installations. In fact, of the five companies that installed for solar together from 2020 to 2023, two are now bust and one has accumulated losses of £5.6m according to their latest accounts.

And remember, your contract isn’t with iChoosr or with your local council - it’s with the installer. And 2 of 5 of the installers in London scheme are now bust.

So, why are so many installers on the Solar Together scheme going bust? Well, again, I’m speculating, but I see three problems. Firstly, installers are bidding on 100s of installs with limited information - and it’s really tough to do enough work to analyse all those roofs. It’s easy to get your calculations wrong and underestimate the true cost of doing the work. Which, on a very large contract like this, could easily cause severe financial problems.

Next, even if you do calculate the work required accurately, you’ll only win the job if your quote is lower than anyone else is willing to do the work for. And that’s a tough place for any business to be in. You most likely have to give such a thin price that you can’t afford to do a high quality installation without cutting corners.

Most solar installers work very hard to get a consistent amount of work so that they can keep all their staff busy at all times. At Spirit Energy, we have 10 full time installers and 20 designers in the office. That’s 30 people we have to pay wages to every month, regardless of how many installations we have. 350 houses in 6 months would max us out for the whole of the 6 months. And we’re not a small installer. For us to take on this work, we’d have to subcontract 10 more installers - for 6 months. And that’s just not something we’re comfortable doing. We just can’t imagine sending installers into someone’s house when we don’t know them personally and can’t guarantee the quality of their work. We think the best way to provide a top class service every time is to have a consistent team that is used to working together - not just on the roof and in your house, but in our office as well.

Solar Together Profit

So now we’ve looked at how hard it is to be an installer for one of these schemes, let’s take a look at how

iChoosr themselves are doing from Solar Together. iChoosr Ltd is the uk branch of a Dutch company iChoosr holdings BV.

We can’t see much from the UK published company accounts, because iChoosr take the opportunity to give the very minimum amount of information they are legally required to give. But we can see that in the year ending December 2021, assuming they paid 19% corporation tax, they made a profit of £961,000 - that’s just in that one year. A year in which they had just 9 employees.

In the year before that, the profit was £517,000. And these numbers are after any money they paid to their directors or to their Dutch holding company.

That’s not a bad return for a company with 9 employees that doesn’t actually do any installs or have any legal responsibility to any of the customers that participated in the solar together group buying scheme.

In Summary, solar installation is not about the cheapest price - it’s about designing the best system for your situation.

Don’t rely on the council or the fact that you’re in a group buying scheme - do the due diligence yourself and get quotes from at least 3 installers, preferably one of which is what we think of as the gold standard - a local solar specialist that has been around for a long time.

Sources

https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/london-assembly-press-releases/urgent-review-solar-together-london-required

To find the independent report by the GLA, search “London Solar Together Evaluation GLA 82284”