27/08/26 Solar Democracy Day?
Twenty-five years ago I had an idea: what if ordinary people could generate a little of their own electricity without needing thousands of pounds, a specialist installer or a complicated subsidy scheme? Today, Britain has finally taken a significant step in that direction.
I have been interested in solar for a very long time. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I worked in charities, businesses, advice centres and local government, on projects ranging from DIY solar water heating and solar home systems for community centres in Nepal, to some of the first PV systems installed on social housing in the UK. I built a fair few systems of my own too and became particularly interested in an idea gaining popularity in Germany and the Netherlands: small, simple, plug-and-play solar generators.
I found myself sitting in meetings with engineers, bureaucrats and representatives of the emerging solar industry, trying to persuade them that there ought to be a place in Britain for something already becoming commonplace on the continent. The technology was hardly revolutionary. Photovoltaic modules could be connected to small grid-tied inverters and generate electricity where it was being used. But the British regulatory system wasn't really designed for that. The prevailing engineering standard, G83, was written around the idea of a properly engineered generating installation. If you wanted to connect generation to the grid, you were entering the world of electrical engineering, installers, certification and distribution network operators.
My argument was that perhaps we were overcomplicating things. If a small inverter was properly designed and tested, why couldn't a tiny solar generator be treated more like an electrical appliance? Because it was tiny, it could be compatible with many more properties, mounted in all sorts of places - not just on roofs - and potentially accessible to people in short-term rented accommodation too. I called the idea Micro PV.
Eventually I decided that if I was going to make Micro PV happen, I needed to stop arguing from the outside and join the pack. I became self-employed and started working seriously on getting Micro PV onto the market. I had been experimenting with small German and Dutch inverters in the 250–600 watt range and managed to get them through the relevant G83 approval process. I even got quite close to obtaining MCS accreditation. My first installation was on my parents' house, as part of the process of getting my fledgling business through MCS evaluation, and I then started looking for further customers.
This was when I discovered that I was perhaps trying to sell a rather different product from the one the market wanted. Not everybody, of course, but many of the people who had the money to invest in solar were primarily interested in maximising the return on their investment. And who could blame them? The Feed-in Tariff was about to make solar PV an extraordinarily attractive financial proposition. A properly sized system wasn't simply a way of producing clean electricity; it was an investment with a government-backed income stream attached to it.
But that wasn't what had got me excited about solar. I wanted to save the world, one solar module at a time. (Back then, we called PV panels "modules", because solar water heating was still a thing - and we called those "panels"!) I wanted to see thousands, eventually millions, of ordinary households generating a little of their own electricity. I wanted someone who couldn't afford a £10,000 solar installation to be able to put a couple of modules somewhere sunny and knock a little off their electricity bill. I wanted solar to be democratic.
Instead, I found myself in a market increasingly populated by people asking how quickly their system would pay for itself. I also discovered that I wasn't especially enthusiastic about becoming a conventional solar installer. There was the business side of it, of course, but there was also the small matter of clambering around on roofs, drilling holes in people's precious houses and taking responsibility for a substantial electrical installation. I became disillusioned with the idea. I became a postman for a while and then set up a community-supported agriculture scheme. I had moved on - to democratising organic vegetables. But I never really abandoned the Micro PV idea.
So how did we get here?
The history of British solar policy is, in part, a history of different attempts to overcome the high cost of PV. The early approach was largely one of capital grants. Government-funded demonstration programmes in the early 2000s helped establish a domestic PV market. It was a perfectly reasonable approach for an immature and expensive technology, but a conventional domestic PV system still cost several thousand pounds and a grant covering perhaps half the cost left the householder to find the rest. The grants helped create a market, but they didn't really democratise solar.
The Feed-in Tariff, introduced in 2010, changed everything. Suddenly solar wasn't simply something that cost money and saved electricity; it was an income-producing asset. The early generation tariffs were extraordinarily generous, with additional payments for electricity exported to the grid. The result was an explosion in domestic solar, a rapidly growing installation industry and a huge injection of private capital into renewable energy. It also helped drive down equipment costs and create a whole new industry, with some excellent companies installing excellent systems, (alongside some less competent operators and a fair bit of customer exploitation)
For me, though, there was an ongoing tension. The people best placed to take advantage of the scheme were those with the capital to buy the asset in the first place. The policy undoubtedly accelerated the transition to renewable energy, but a substantial part of its financial benefit went to people who could already invest. From where I was sitting, it felt like the worst of capitalism: a technology which ought to belong to everybody had become an attractive investment for people with spare capital.
Then came the "free solar" solution. Companies would install PV on your roof at no upfront cost. In return, they creamed off the Feed-in Tariff income while the householder benefited from the electricity generated and consumed on the premises. This removed the capital barrier for people who couldn't afford it, and it certainly brought solar to households who might otherwise have been excluded. But ownership - and the lucrative income stream - belonged to somebody else. It was a clever business model, but it still wasn't quite the democratic energy system I had imagined.
The Feed-in Tariff eventually closed to new applicants in 2019. By then the cost of solar PV had fallen dramatically; it was no longer the prohibitively expensive technology I had been wrestling with in the early 2000s. But the regulatory architecture still largely reflected the world in which it had been developed. Domestic solar remained, broadly speaking, something to be professionally designed and installed. There are good reasons for that: electricity generation connected to the public network needs to be safe, electrical protection matters and the distribution network needs to know what is connected. But I couldn't help thinking about that original question from twenty years ago: does every little bit of solar really need to be treated as a miniature power station?
And now, finally, Micro PV comes of age
Today - 27 August 2026 - something rather extraordinary has happened. The UK has created a proper regulatory route for plug-in microgeneration. The new arrangements recognise a plug-in microgenerator of up to 800 watts. A compliant plug-in solar device can be connected to an ordinary domestic socket without a professional installer. It still must meet the required product and electrical standards, and it still needs to be notified to the Distribution Network Operator, but the householder is no longer required to commission a conventional professionally installed PV system.
The technical framework sits within the revised G98 arrangements, alongside new statutory regulations governing the plug and plug-in generating equipment. This isn't quite the system I was trying to establish twenty years ago, but it is remarkably close. The philosophy has changed from "a solar generator is an electrical installation - get an installer" towards "a sufficiently small and properly engineered solar generator can be a consumer product." That is a profound change, and I find it rather satisfying to see it finally happen.
But have we actually democratised solar?
Well… perhaps not quite yet. The first generation of products appearing on the market looks suspiciously like something we have seen before. The technology is being packaged into complete kits and sold through DIY stores and large online retailers. There's nothing wrong with that - it's probably exactly how a new consumer product reaches a mass market - but when I look at some of the prices, I can't help thinking: here we go again.
We have finally removed the professional installer from the equation. But have we simply replaced the local installer margin with a sizeable profit for a corporate? That raises a question which I think is worth asking: can a savvy consumer buy the individual components instead? Can I buy compliant PV modules, a compliant microinverter, the appropriate connection equipment and a suitable mounting system separately, assemble them myself and end up with a legal, compliant 800 W (or smaller) plug-in generator?
Right now, the answer appears to be not quite as straightforward as one might hope. The new product specification is written around a compliant plug-in solar device, rather than simply saying that any collection of individually compliant components can be assembled by the consumer. If the market develops around sealed, proprietary £1,000 boxes, we will have made DIY solar legal without necessarily making it affordable. And affordability is rather important if the objective is democratisation.
The beauty of small solar
There is another reason I remain fascinated by Micro PV. An 800W system isn't trying to be a miniature version of a conventional 4kW rooftop installation. It can do something much more modest - and potentially much more interesting. Every home has a background electricity demand. Fridges and freezers cycle on and off. Routers run continuously. Televisions, chargers, controls and appliances consume small amounts of electricity even when we're not consciously using them. A small PV system can spend much of its time supplying this baseload directly. The electricity is generated very close to where it is being consumed, rather than necessarily being exported into the distribution network.
Now imagine that multiplied across a million homes. Not a few hundred thousand houses with large, expensive solar arrays, but millions of people with a little bit of generation of their own.
That is a rather different energy system. And the timing is interesting. We are simultaneously worrying about the cost of energy to households, the future demand created by electrification and data centres, the resilience of our energy infrastructure and the continuing vulnerability of fossil-fuel energy supplies. Against that background, perhaps there is something rather powerful about giving ordinary people the ability to make a small amount of their own electricity.
So, is solar finally democratic?
Twenty years ago, I couldn't persuade the system to let ordinary people plug a tiny solar generator into their homes. Today, it says they can. But I don't think the job is finished. The interesting question isn't whether Britain can make a Micro PV system legal. It is whether we can make it genuinely affordable, accessible and democratic. Perhaps the next step is to find out exactly what the new rules allow us to build.
And then build one.