Ever thought about solar panels, but been put off by the cost or all the hassle of having them wired up your electrics? Well, it’s your lucky day. The UK government has just announced that from the middle of the year you will be able to buy, online or from supermarkets, cheap, stand-alone, solar panel kits that you can just plug into the nearest socket. At last pretty much everyone can benefit from that big, yellow, free power source in the sky.
The panels can be attached to roofs, leant against walls in the garden, or be free-standing. They can even be fixed to balconies in flats. It’s a win all round – good for the planet and good for your wallet.
Domestic solar panel systems have been available for decades, starting off expensive, but getting cheaper as the cost of panels plumetted over time. I had mine installed in 2012, a time when there was a 45p per unit feed-in tariff, which rewarded early adopters for generating power. The panels theselves cost about £10,000 to get up and running, but the tariff pays us well over £1,000 a year so, nearly 15 years on, I am quids in. When the sun is shining, the panels produce about two-thirds of our average daily energy demand, so I estimate we also save around £500 a year - around £7,500 since installation. Pretty good going when you consider that we are still getting paid the tariff too.
The amount of energy they generate varies – if it’s very sunny, it’s possible to produce more power than the house needs at the time, and this extra would normally go back into the grid. We have, however, invested in a device that intercepts this (legally!) and heats the water in the immersion tank as well.
By the end of 2024, about 1.6 million solar panel systems had been installed in the UK, mostly in domestic settings, and there is no sign of demand abating. In fact, 2025 saw almost 300,000 solar installations recorded – an all time record for the UK – taking the country’s solar power-generating capacity to 21.5 Gigawatts. This is more than the 16 GW capacity of all the offshore wind farms currently operating in the North Sea, and is enough to power more than six million homes.
Solar panels have come down in price by more than 80 percent in the last 15 years, and are now far cheaper than when I bought mine. Traditional, wired-in, solar panel installations are still, however, relatively expensive compared to the cost of the grid electricity they save, and the Energy Savings Trust estimates that the average cost of a domestic solar panel system remains a smidgen over £6,000, while the average generating capacity is 3.5 kWp. This is the kilowatt peak, which is a measure of the maximum amount of power the system can produce.
A single panel can cost anything from below £100 to more than £300, depending on the specs. In addition, you will need to fork out anything up to £5,000 on installation costs, which haven’t come down. You won’t get a feed-in tariff for generating power, as this ended in 2019, but you can sign up for the Smart Export Guarantee, which will pay for energy exported to the grid, although you will need to have a smart meter to take advantage of this. The amount you get isn’t going to be huge in any case, and it is still estimated on average, to take anything from six to nine years to break even.
And this is where the new plug-in systems come-in. They are a much cheaper, smaller set-up that can still save you money and which you can connect up yourself – a qualified electrician is not required. If you don’t have a suitable roof, you can put your plug-in panel somewhere else – in the garden or fixed to an outside wall that catches the sun. Plug-in solar is also designed to be portable, so if you move house you can take it with you. And there are no associated technical risks either. This isn’t new technology, just a different way of delivering the sun’s energy to your home, and it has been big in Europe for years.
The number of small plug-in systems is growing rapidly in countries like France, Austria, Italy and Poland, but it is Germany that is leading the way. Here, over a million plug-in solar installations were registered by the end of last year, but the true number is thought to be four million or more. The systems are not as powerful as the bigger, wired-in, installations, and are limited to 800 Watts, in order to avoid overloading household circuits. There is likely to be a similar size limit in the UK too, although the government has yet to confirm what this will be.
The long and the short of it is that everyone should be installing plug-in solar once it becomes available. An 800 Watt kit is expected to cost about £400 and will be legal to install from the summer. A word of advice – even if your energy provider will allow you to sell energy to the grid, try and utilise as much as possible of your solar power. While you will likely get somewhere between 4p and 15p per unit for exporting electricity to the grid, you will be saving up to 30p or more for every unit of solar you use.
Joining the solar club will not only mean that you use less electricity from the grid, and reduce your bills accordingly, but also that you play your part in tackling the climate crisis. In Germany, the combined contribution to the energy landscape of the many thousands of individual households with plug-in solar, is comparable to that of a large gas power station. Displacing fossil fuels in this way not only brings down carbon emissions, but also provides safe and reliable power when – as today – the world is going to hell in a handcart and gas supply is in disarray.
A version of this article was published in the ‘i’ newspaper on March 25th 2026