The Smart Export Guarantee: solar's income side

Solar support in England didn't end with the grants — it changed shape. The Smart Export Guarantee (SEG) obliges larger electricity suppliers to pay you for every kilowatt-hour your panels send to the grid. It will not make panels free, but chosen well it knocks one to three years off a system's payback.

How SEG works

Since 2020, licensed suppliers above a size threshold must offer at least one export tariff to homes with MCS-certified renewable generation up to 5 MW. Your smart meter records what you export half-hourly; the supplier pays per kWh at their tariff rate. The legislation sets only a floor — rates must be above zero — and leaves the actual number to competition. That single design decision explains everything confusing about SEG: rates legitimately range from around a penny per kWh on the worst tariffs to 15p, 20p, sometimes near 30p on the best, often conditional on holding the same supplier's import tariff or buying their installation.

The practical consequence: SEG is a shopping decision, not a registration formality. A typical 4 kWp system in England exports perhaps 1,500–2,500 kWh a year depending on how much you self-consume. Across that volume, the spread between a 3p tariff and a 15p tariff is £180–£300 every year — for filling in a different form.

Choosing a tariff without losing a weekend

You are not tied to your import supplier. You can buy electricity from one company and sell exports to another, though the best rates are frequently reserved for dual customers — do the arithmetic both ways.

Fixed versus variable matters less than the headline rate, but check the term: some attractive rates are 12-month fixes that quietly revert to a much lower variable rate.

Batteries change the calculation. With storage you export less and self-consume more, which shrinks SEG income but grows bill savings — usually a good trade, since a self-consumed kWh is worth whatever you pay for import (typically 22–28p) versus the export rate. Some time-of-use tariffs even pay you to charge the battery cheaply overnight and export at peak; if you enjoy optimising, that is the deep end.

You need MCS paperwork. Suppliers require your MCS certificate and proof of a smart meter to onboard you — one more reason the installer you choose via the routes on our current schemes page must be MCS-certified.

What SEG means for the "free solar" question

Under the old Feed-in Tariff, generous payments effectively made systems self-financing — which is partly where the "free solar panels" phrase came from, via roof-lease companies that harvested those payments. FiT closed to new entrants in 2019, and SEG's market rates are leaner. The honest 2026 framing: SEG is a meaningful income stream that improves the economics of a system you pay for — typically £100–£300 a year — rather than a mechanism that makes panels free. Combined with 0% VAT and a group-buy purchase price, it is a central reason self-funded solar still stacks up despite the grant era ending.

Official scheme detail: Ofgem — Smart Export Guarantee