Miliband’s Bonkers Solar Blunder
Last week, Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero launched a new policy: “Rooftop solar for new builds to save people money.” The idea is that by “unleashing a rooftop revolution… a typical existing UK home could save around £530 a year from installing rooftop solar”. This, said Miliband in news interviews and his trademark social media skit, is “just common sense”. Once again, however, the economics underpinning the Government’s interpretation of “common sense” is not so straightforward and requires a lot to be taken for granted – or simply ignored.
“Looking both ways before you cross the road,” explains the Secretary of State, “not leaving your house without your keys… brushing your teeth before you go to bed… and yes, putting solar panels on the rooftops of new homes. It’s just common sense.” “Cutting energy bills by hundreds of pounds,” he concludes, “who could possibly be against that?”
To read the rest of this article, you need to donate at least £5/month or £50/year to the Daily Sceptic, then create an account on this website. The easiest way to create an account after you’ve made a donation is to click on the ‘Log In’ button on the main menu bar, click ‘Register’ underneath the sign-in box, then create an account, making sure you enter the same email address as the one you used when making a donation. Once you’re logged in, you can then read all our paywalled content, including this article. Being a Donor will also entitle you to comment below the line and access the premium content in the Sceptic, our weekly podcast. A one-off donation of at least £5 will also entitle you to the same benefits for one month. You can donate here.
There are more details about how to create an account, and a number of things you can try if you’re already a donor – and have an account – but cannot access the above perks on our Premium page.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
We need to all realise that when government speak about energy or climate (and actually almost everything else) that they speak with forked tongue. We have been spun an eco socialist lie about climate and energy for so long now that the general public do not know if they are coming or going. My Sister in law eg thinks the weather is “all messed up”. She thinks this for one reason only. She see it on TV News almost everyday. She has never looked at any climate data, and is totally unaware that there is Natural Variability in the UK Climate. What she thinks is “climate change” is simply natural variation. I recall 1995. In that year it was sunny all the way from April to September, and when I say sunny I mean blue skies every single day. This is easily checked online. I became so used to the sun shining that I was putting on shorts first thing in the morning every day. If this were to happen this year in 2025 the BBC, Guardian, Independent and all the eco socialist governments and TV Channels would have a field day telling us how this was all due to… Read more »
‘Global Warming’ hadn’t been invented back in ’76, the year of ‘The Big Sun’. I was stationed at RAF Brize Norton at the time and flying over the fields on approach to the runway everywhere was a sandy brown, rather than green. I recall that in May, I bought a TR6 and parked it on our driveway (top down) and didn’t put the roof up until late august, with nary a drop of rain in between. Then AGW was ‘invented’ in the late 80s and buggered everything up.
Back in the 1-960s there were scare stories about a coming ice age and theories about its cause. My father was a small farmer and shrugged off the scares by observiing “so long as that light bulb up there keeps burning there won’t be a problem”.
However, when they talk of what they claim are record temperatures in one place and on one day they have sullen faces. When they forecast sunny warmer weather in summer they are joyous. In winter they are sullen when there is snow or warnmer than usual weather.
Clearly the Met office presenters have a model of daily and annual weather in their minds and any variation is distressing to them.
And they have acquired a defensive attitude to forecast presentation, with it’s roots back in the Autumn 1987 débacle, when it was a bit windy in the south east. Not allowed to say things like “don’t worry, it’s not going to happen here…..”.
I am currently fitting solar simply because I want to avoid the govt’s future load-balancing as far as I can.
Wouldn’t a small generator be cheaper?
This is the way we have gone, £750 investment including a bit of wiring for petrol 2kw one. This is enough to run the whole house except for oven and toaster! The gas boiler will keep us warm (most likely to be needed in cold and dark part of year) and can cook on the gas hob and use microwave with care. Relatively easy peesy
Nice one. How do you plug the gas boiler controls into the generator? And will it power the water and heating circulation pumps? My 2800 Gen will run one, maybe two, electric rings, but I have BBQs and firepits for proper cooking
What do you mean by “load balancing”?
If you want to be independent of the grid, solar seems an odd choice as the sun is not exactly reliable in the UK. Unless you have batteries, which I would think are a fire risk, bulky, extra cost and presumably would “wear out” – and I don’t know how long they would last.
This is a good one to watch – JIM FORAN Fire Safety of PV Solar Panels. Subscribe now to see more great High Rise Fire CPD videos
Not sure it will be helpful if the government ‘load balances’ after dark or in the winter?😳
Not sure if the Government would have an effing clue what that meant………..
Usually, domestic solar with grid feed-in is configured to shut off to the property and grid in the event the grid power goes down.
This is to prevent unbalanced power from domestic solar units causing damage to grid equipment, or in the case the power has been shut off to allow maintenance/repair to avoid risk of electrocution to power-workers from domestic feed-in.
This financial analysis only touches upon possible maintenance costs. In my experience of the domestic renewables sector, any single repair or maintenance call-out could easily exceed £330, For solar, they are working at roof level and require safe access, which alone costs £200. Reality catches up with fantasy yet again..
When will the reality of the dole queue catch up with the fantasy of Miliband?
Great article; thanks.
Though the headline is somewhat generous in characterising this as a mistake.
I have an unobstructed south facing roof and I could afford to install solar, but I’m not because I worked out for myself that, living alone with relatively small electricity consumption, it simply isn’t worth it.
Our roof faces NE and SW so misses the benefit of maximum sun, unless we put solar panels on both sides of the roof.
The house is timber framed and challenging to insulate further, and our heating pipes are microbore and would need to be replaced if we were obliged to have a heat pump.
So it would be much more expensive to go green and require substantial amounts of freshly manufactured components. We are doing the environment more good by staying with fossil fuel.
What about the fire risk of solar panels on a house? Years ago a friend in insurance said that there were problems in Germany with firemen being electrocuted trying to put out rooftop fires. There was a fire in Bristol on the roof of a hospital recently St Michael’s Hospital fire Bristol: Pregnant women moved to safety – BBC News
This link covers solar panel fires JIM FORAN Fire Safety of PV Solar Panels. Subscribe now to see more great High Rise Fire CPD videos
What are the insurance companies saying about solar installations on houses? If they pull out of insuring such houses where will that leave the home owners?
With a pile of broken solar panels on the front lawn I imagine, pretty damned smartish
Exactly my thoughts too. How can you really know if someone is properly qualified to do the installation/maintenance/repair? There are always snagging issues with new build – the chance of a poorly installed solar panel would put me right off. I suspect a recent local house fire may have been solar panel related. Only the roof and one upstairs room showed extensive damage and the sheer number of responders – fire engines, multiple other vehicles – made me think something unusual was going on.Plus not one sentence in the local paper.
Another problem is whether the inverters and wiring used will actually meet the radiated electrical noise regulations, there is only one electromagnetic spectrum and the radiated emissions from these things will very likely interfere with other radio systems in the vicinity, not to mention on radio amateurs such as myself who expect to have a relatively quiet radio environment around their home.
A lot of things are interconnected in our complex world, nasty cheap installations are almost guaranteed to cause these problems and when every house has them it will probably become a major problem when people’s mobile phones and broadcast radios stop working.
This story suggests solar panels and their suppliers/installers might not last 25 years. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/06/05/failure-was-an-option-sunnovas-taxpayer-funded-solar-flop/ There is another problem. Contrary to government assumptions house building needs months or (more likely) years of preparation. Early in the process designs have to be sumbitted to get planning approval. Although Miliband has announced his intention to require solar panels on new houses and ban gas boilers we do not know which houses. Will it be all new house starts? Many developers will already have plans, costings, contractors etc ready to stary this summer or in the autumn. Preparations will have been made for winter and spring 2026 starts. Which of them will be affected. Will houses already under construction be affected. Some houses are completed in a few months but some take much longer so houses already now under way in June will not be completed before Milioband promises to introduce new reuirements. Will boiler orders have to be cancelled and at what cost, will heating and insulation systems have to be stripped out and replaced. Will roof designs have to be alterred to facilitate solar panels and battery installation. Marketing plans might have to be changed. Why can governments never explain their intentions… Read more »
Cos they’ve only just made these plans up!
And fewer and fewer people seem to have the ability to think anything through.
There already are some quite new houses with PV panels integrated into the roof, with them being in place of roof tiles. It’s rare to do that on existing roofs, though. Since 2014 I have had some on the roof, with the supporting bars being mounted on top of the tiles, and attached to the timber underneath.
Installation of PV panels on existing houses have long been permitted development; no need to apply for planning permission for those.
It is just about possible that it might have an effect on new estate development, to optimise the performance by the overall layout and shape of roofs etc, but I suspect it would be down the scale compared with squeezing in the odd one or two houses to maximise revenue.
I remember the late autumn of 1972. I was an apprentice tree surgeon. I was working in London. Daffodils and willow trees were coming into flower and leaves budding on the trees. It was mid December. Global warming or variable British weather? The greeny Gretas would be freaking out if that happened today.
Oh yes, added more uncontrolled solar power onto the grid is a brilliant idea. Spain has demonstrated the problem of excess solar quite well. You can also look at a grid failure in Australia where fear of prosecution for incompetence led the grid managers to deny a new solar farm access to the grid until they could assure a 24/7 supply – as they had no budget for backup generation it remains unconnected. And you could ask the German grid managers how they feel about the unconstrained growth of domestic solar as they fear copying Spain.
The inverter required needs replacing every 10 years approx – present day cost about £1 500 depending on number of panels.
Lifetime expectancy of solar panels is 10 to 15 years over which time they will become less efficient. And they will need to be cleaned frequently.
Net Zero requires no understanding of physics or economics.
Ben doesn’t quite convey the absurdity of imposing the cost of a solar panel installation on new homeowners. A 3.5 kWp £10,000 panel+battery installation added to a 30 year 5% mortgage will cost £19,325. Money Saving Expert were, until a few weeks ago, claiming £340 a year saving for that size of unit, giving a 57 year payback period. Details here: https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/dim
I’ve just had one of the aforementioned conmen come round for an assessment. Despite warning him that I wouldn’t buy anything on the day, I got the hard sell, including “phone call to the boss”. He was very light on detail, and couldn’t answer many of the points Ben raises in this article. His projections were based on a 7% rise in electricity prices per year which “was all they were allowed to use”. In the end the price dropped from £13,000 to £9,000, and he went home empty handed.
Funnily enough, I’ve just had a quote from a local “solar together” scheme run by the council, and that’s £7,000. But as Ben points out, it’s only a good deal because we’re paying outrageous artificially high prices for our energy. I won’t be buying, having faith, as I do that something, sooner, rather than later will have to be done about energy costs.
But it is much better to have solar panels on roof tops than on vast acres of farmland. The trouble is Minibrain wants to do both. I don’t think he cares about food self sufficiency.
I put solar panels on my east and west facing roofs 10 years ago. I took the money out of a lucrative pharmaceutical fund simply because I didn’t want any of my savings to go to big pharma. Of course the solar panel investment wasn’t wise from a financial point of view. It cost me £6,000 to install them and I get about £200 a year back from the feed-in tariff plus my electricity bills have probably gone down a bit. From June to August all my hot water comes from the sun. But in December the solar panels hardly work at all.
AGW and Net Zero is a complete fraud and this latest Milliband fantasy is madness. Nevertheless I calculated 6 years ago that solar would be a good idea for us. We are a retired couple at home all day so our loads are relatively low (no tumble-dryer or EV) and we can almost always run the diswasher and washing machine when it is sunny – there’s enough of those even in winter for the amount we use them. Plus we were able to get in on the last tariff, so we can sell our excess production. I originally calculated an ROI of just over 10 years allowing for the loss of interest on the capital, and since the electricity prices went up it will only be a couple more years before they are paid off. They have never needed to be cleaned and are not showing any sign of degradation. For many years I concluded that a battery would not be cost-effective, but a recalculation (using 5 years of real data and a complex XL spreadsheet) indicated that with the more recent tariffs it would now make sense. I now have a year’s worth of data from my Powerwall and… Read more »
The battery is key for most people, giving the ability to store and consume your own power outside of generation hours + backup power for the inevitable cuts. Winter solar in the UK is not great, so over panelling as much as practical is best, including traditionally unfavoured north elevations even, given most of cost is in the scaffold and the labour, not the panels themselves.