Do I Need to Tell My Electricity Supplier About Solar?

For a plug-in solar device in Great Britain, the notification that’s compulsory goes to your distribution network operator, not your electricity supplier. Telling your supplier is a separate question, and it only changes anything if you want paying for the electricity you export. Most self-installed kits can’t be paid.

Those two organisations get confused constantly, and the confusion is fair enough. One of them bills you every month. The other you’ve probably never heard of. Most people who install solar panels have never knowingly dealt with the second, which is why the notification that matters gets missed.

Your supplier and your network operator aren’t the same organisation

Your electricity supplier is the company that sells you power and sends you the electricity bill. You picked them, and you can leave for another supplier whenever you like.

Your distribution network operator, or DNO, owns and runs the cables, substations and poles that physically bring power to your street. You didn’t pick them and you can’t switch. Which one you have is decided by geography.

A supplier’s interest in solar panels installed at your address is commercial. A solar panel system will affect how much electricity you buy from them, and they’re the only route by which an export payment could reach you. The network operator’s interest is technical. It needs to know what’s connected to the electricity network, because a street full of small generators changes how much electricity is feeding into the electrical grid locally.

Only the second comes with a duty attached. Our explainer on what a distribution network operator actually does covers the split.

The notification that’s mandatory goes to your network operator

Notifying your DNO isn’t optional. IPS version 2 requires the device itself to carry a statement that notification to the network operator about connection and disconnection is mandatory, with a link to instructions, plus a QR code pointing at the registration and deregistration guidance.

The route today is Engineering Recommendation G98, which governs how small generating equipment connects to the low-voltage network in Great Britain. A simplified registration pathway for plug-in solar is still in development. What’s unfinished is the easier route, not the obligation.

There’s a knock-on worth knowing. G98 restricts a household to one connected device, even though IPS version 2 permits one per final circuit. Two limits apply and the tighter wins, so it’s one device per household.

For the process rather than the principle, start with notifying your DNO for a balcony kit, then the field-by-field walkthrough of G98 Form B.

What your smart meter records when you export

A modern smart meter doesn’t run backwards when your panels generate electricity. That was the old spinning-disc behaviour, and it’s gone. The smart metering technical specification requires a meter to hold a Total Active Export Register, defined as "the register recording the total cumulative Active Energy Exported". Import and export sit on separate registers: the electricity from the grid that you draw in, and the electricity back to the grid that you push out, each recorded in half-hourly periods.

So the export register exists whether or not anybody pays you for what’s on it. The meter can record that 40 kilowatt-hours of excess energy generated by your panels went out last quarter. Recording how much electricity you export and being paid for it are two different processes. The register is also the limit of what a supplier can see: it can’t reveal how much electricity your solar PV system is producing in total, because only what crosses the meter gets measured.

There’s a practical caveat for plug-in solar. A compliant device tops out at 800 VA of output and 3.5 A of current, and mid-afternoon the power produced by your panels is usually swallowed by a fridge, a router and whatever else is on standby. Your panels might briefly make more than the house is using, but a balcony solar system sends very little electricity to the grid across a year. See the self-consumption maths for a plug-in kit.

Solar panels and battery storage together would change that balance, holding surplus electricity back for the evening instead of exporting it. That route isn’t open to a plug-in device, because a solar battery storage system sits outside the statutory definition the plug-in route depends on.

Why exported units earn nothing until a tariff is attached to them

The scheme that pays for exported electricity is the Smart Export Guarantee. It replaced the Feed-in Tariff, which Ofgem records as closing to new applicants from 1 April 2019. The FiT paid government-set rates on electricity both generated and exported. The SEG pays a supplier-set rate, and only on what you export.

Ofgem defines mandatory SEG licensees as "licenced electricity suppliers with at least 150,000 domestic electricity customers", who "must offer at least one SEG compliant tariff". Smaller suppliers can join voluntarily. The scheme covers installations up to 5MW of total installed capacity, or 50kW for micro-CHP, and has run since 1 January 2020.

Ofgem then sets three gates: the installation and installer must be suitably certified, there must be an export meter, and there must be an export MPAN. The meter "must be capable of taking half-hourly measurements and have an export MPAN".

That MPAN is the part people miss, and it’s the mechanical reason unregistered export earns nothing. Ofgem puts the job on the supplier, not on you: "It is the responsibility of SEG licensees to ensure that the generator is set up with an Export MPAN that associates with their meter." Licensees pay for electricity you export, so selling electricity back to one needs that link in place first. Until a licensee has made it, there’s no reference the reading can be billed against, and the electricity you produce and don’t use is simply given away. Nobody sends you a cheque, and nobody sends you a bill either.

Our hub on how SEG payments actually work covers the scheme end to end.

The certification gate, and why a self-installed kit runs into it

Ofgem’s restatement of the gate is short: "For solar PV, wind and micro-CHP installations up to 50kW this will mean presenting a Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) certificate or equivalent." An MCS certificate covers the solar installation and the installer together, and it’s issued by the accredited contractor who did the work. It’s the standard route for renewable energy systems of this size.

"Equivalent" has a definition rather than being a courtesy: Ofgem’s guidance for licensees says an equivalent scheme is one "accredited in accordance with EN 45011 or EN ISO/IEC 17065:2012". Flexi-Orb is named as such a scheme on gov.uk, though not in Ofgem’s own SEG guidance, so that attribution is worth getting right.

A plug-in solar device is designed so that there’s no installer. You take it out of the box and put the plug in a socket. There’s no accredited contractor to issue a certificate, and no certificate to send a licensee.

Two published positions sit awkwardly here, and we’d rather point at the gap than paper over it. DESNZ describes plug-in solar as a "low-cost, self-install route" households can use "without the need for an electrician". Ofgem, for solar PV at 50kW or under, wants a certified installer as well as a certified installation. Nothing we found reconciles those.

What Ofgem says about the uncertified case is precise, and it isn’t a flat no: "If you are unable to demonstrate that your installation is suitably certified, a SEG licensee is not obliged to offer payments under the SEG, but they can make payments if they wish."

That discretion does get used. Octopus publishes a route to export payment without MCS or Flexi-Orb, asking instead for an Electrical Installation Certificate, a Building Regulations Certificate of Compliance and a DNO acceptance letter. Which is where a plug-in kit comes unstuck a second time: an Electrical Installation Certificate is issued by an electrician for work an electrician did. Octopus also says on its own site that plug-in setups are "too small to qualify for smart grid export payments", so it isn’t a route it intends plug-in owners to use.

We won’t assert that no licensee anywhere will pay for a self-installed solar energy system. Per-supplier detail lives on the pages that own those figures:

• Octopus SEG tariff
• British Gas SEG tariff
• E.ON SEG tariff
• EDF SEG tariff
• OVO Energy SEG tariff
• Scottish Power SEG tariff

For the comparison view, see what each SEG licensee pays and who qualifies. We don’t repeat rates here, because they move and the supplier pages are where they’re maintained.

What actually happens if you tell your supplier nothing

How solar panels work with your electricity bill is simpler than people expect. You don’t need to do anything at all: no form, no registration, no phone call. A solar panel installation will reduce your electricity bill on its own, because every unit your panels generate is a unit you didn’t buy. Nobody pays for the electricity they generate and use themselves, so your electricity costs fall without the meter being told why. Solar panels cut your energy bills by cutting what you import, and the solar energy your panels generate for the house never reaches a bill at all.

The standing charge doesn’t move, because that’s a fixed daily charge for being connected to the electricity supply, and generating your own solar power doesn’t disconnect you.

What you lose by staying quiet is only the export side, and for a balcony kit that’s a small number. A balcony system rarely makes enough electricity at any one moment to export much of it. The government’s estimate for annual savings from plug-in solar is £70 to £110, and a balcony sits at the bottom of that band, because the upper figure models a 30 degree south-facing installation rather than a near-vertical railing.

We went looking for a duty to tell your supplier and couldn’t find one. We checked Ofgem’s SEG guidance for generators and for licensees, Ofgem’s SEG scheme, small-scale generation and smart meter pages, the gov.uk SEG page, the gov.uk guidance on registering energy devices, and the ENA’s G98 summary guide. Every notification duty in them runs to the network operator. The gov.uk device-registration guidance is the most direct: "you are required to register your energy device with your Distribution Network Operator (DNO), the company that is responsible for bringing electricity to the property." Your supplier isn’t mentioned in it at all. The ENA guide’s only reference to your supplier is that it "is your point of contact for the SEG scheme".

Two caveats: the duties that do exist toward a supplier are contract terms that start once you hold an export tariff, and we checked published guidance rather than every supplier’s own terms.

The thing that genuinely bites is the DNO notification, and the ENA puts the timescale at "within 28 days of the date of commissioning".

When you should tell your energy supplier anyway

If you install solar panels and want more than the automatic bill saving, there are a few situations where telling your energy supplier about your new solar panels earns its keep:

• You have an MCS-certified solar PV system as well. If you also have certified rooftop generation, the export side is live and worth setting up properly.
• Your meter isn’t reading half-hourly. Time-of-use and smart tariffs need half-hourly data, and your supplier controls how often your meter is read.
• You’re moving to another supplier. Switching doesn’t affect your generation, but an export arrangement doesn’t follow you automatically.
• You’re on a tariff that rewards shifting usage. Pairing new solar panels with cheap overnight rates changes the maths. See pairing balcony solar with a smart tariff.

Your supplier may ask for your address, your MPAN, the capacity in kW and the commissioning date. Letting your supplier know costs nothing, and in those four cases keeping your supplier informed buys you something.

What 27 August 2026 changes here, and what it doesn’t

From 27 August 2026, compliant plug-in solar devices can lawfully be sold and used in Great Britain. That’s a change to product law and to the rules on use. It isn’t a change to how a household with solar panels gets paid for what it exports, and it creates no new route to certify a solar panel installation.

We read the government’s response in full to check. Across 54 pages, "Smart Export Guarantee" appears twice, both times summarising what respondents asked for rather than what government committed to: consultees "referenced wider policy levers such as VAT relief and Smart Export Guarantee reform", and asked for "clearer arrangements for exported electricity". Neither MCS nor the Microgeneration Certification Scheme appears anywhere in it, and the closing reply doesn’t list export arrangements among what government will take forward. The statutory instrument mentions no export payment or export metering either.

So legalisation makes the device lawful. It doesn’t build a route to export payments for it. What actually changes on 27 August 2026 has the full before-and-after.

Frequently asked questions

Do you need to tell your energy supplier you have solar panels? We checked Ofgem’s SEG guidance, its scheme pages, the gov.uk SEG and energy-device registration guidance and the ENA’s G98 summary, and found nothing saying you need to inform your energy supplier before or after you install solar panels of the plug-in kind. Your bill falls anyway. Telling them matters only if you want paying for exported units.

Do I need to register my solar panels with my energy supplier? Registration in the sense that matters is with your network operator, under G98, and that one is mandatory. Registering with a supplier means applying for an export tariff, which is voluntary and depends on meeting the licensee’s eligibility criteria.

Do I have to notify the Distribution Network Operator about my solar panels? Yes. DNO notification is mandatory, and IPS version 2 requires compliant products to say so on the device itself and to carry a QR code pointing at the registration guidance. The ENA puts the deadline at 28 days from commissioning.

Why does my energy supplier need to know about my solar panels? For billing purposes it doesn’t. The reasons a supplier would want to know are administrative: setting up the export MPAN, putting you on an export tariff, or configuring a time-of-use tariff. None of that happens on its own.

Do I need to tell my supplier before installation? No. There’s no pre-installation notification to a supplier for a plug-in device. The notification with a deadline attached is the G98 one to your network operator, submitted once the device is commissioned.

Can I sell my excess solar energy back to the grid? You can only sell surplus solar energy through an export tariff with a SEG licensee, and eligibility normally rests on an MCS certificate or an equivalent. A self-installed device has no accredited installer to issue one. Ofgem leaves licensees free to pay anyway, and at least one publishes an alternative route, but that route asks for an Electrical Installation Certificate a plug-in kit also won’t have.

Can I switch energy suppliers if I have solar panels? Yes. Generation on site doesn’t restrict who you buy electricity from. If you do have an export arrangement, it doesn’t transfer by itself, so check what happens to it before you switch.

How do solar panels affect your electricity bill? Solar panels in the UK reduce the amount of electricity you import, which reduces the variable part of the bill. They don’t touch the standing charge. For a plug-in device the government’s estimate is £70 to £110 a year in lower energy costs, and a balcony installation sits at the low end of that range.

Does my smart meter tell my supplier how much solar I’ve sent back to the grid? The smart metering specification requires a Total Active Export Register, so export is measured separately from import. Being measured isn’t the same as being paid: Ofgem makes the supplier responsible for setting up the export MPAN that turns a reading into a payment. Without that, the units are recorded and given away.

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If you’re still working out where your kit stands, our guide to whether balcony solar is legal in the UK is the place to start.