
Here, Powervault Founder Joe Warren and CEO Robin Stopford outline the opportunity of batteries to balance the grid and help achieve Clean Power 2030, and discuss how the FHS could be adjusted to incorporate this vital technology.
In the next five years the new Government is planning to build millions of much needed new homes AND has the objective of achieving Clean Power by 2030. Today’s technology can help achieve both goals by ensuring that new homes consume little or no energy.
However, a review currently underway of the Future Homes Standard could potentially jeopardise both these goals. The Future Homes Standard, proposed under the previous Government, will specify minimum standards for how developers should build new homes and what technologies should be incorporated.
It will replace the SAP – or standard assessment procedure – a method that housebuilders use to determine how to make homes energy efficient.
A key part of the Future Homes Standard is a proposal to mandate that solar panels are fitted to all new homes. Rumours have recently circulated that the Government plans to remove or to water down this requirement. As so often in the renewable sector, it feels like David versus Goliath with the lobbying power of traditional incumbents holding sway over Government.
A more nuanced issue, which has received no attention is that the Future Homes Standard proposals do not provide any incentive to install batteries with solar.
Why is this important? The former Government stated that one of five key objectives of the Future Homes Standard is reducing the impact of new buildings on peak grid usage. Every day, usually between 4pm and 7pm, the grid is put under additional ‘peak’ strains.
Benefit of home batteries ‘effectively ignored’
This is likely to get worse as we start to heat our homes electrically. The Future Homes Standard was consulted upon in March 2024. At that time the benefit of home batteries was effectively ignored. In our experience, the cost of batteries is now so low that in 2024 about 80% of solar installations retrofitted to existing homes have batteries attached to them. This market change should be reflected in the FHS before it is too late.
There is a structural issue that should be addressed at the same time. Under the current proposals, there is no incentive for housebuilders to include batteries in their designs. Solar energy would be rewarded whether it is used on site or exported because the FHS assumes that energy exported has exactly the same value as energy stored and used in the home.
This is clearly not true: it would be much better to store some of that electricity locally to be used later in the day when national demand is greater, and electricity more expensive. We know that solar panels generate most of their energy in the middle of the day when demand is lower. In fact at this time of day there is now often too much energy on the grid resulting in solar PV systems switching off and in some cases, negative electricity prices in the wholesale market. Conversely, electricity demand, and costs, are much higher in the evening.
Furthermore. The recent National Energy System Operator (NESO) report on how to achieve clean power for Great Britain by 2030 recognises that the investment in infrastructure has to increase by a factor of four over the rate deployed in the last decade.
The capital, planning, supply chain, engineering and technical challenges are obvious. A way to alleviate some of this investment pressure is to shift the demand away from the peak load times. Again, local storage coupled to solar allows both micro-generation even when the sun is not shining, when the grid is at its most constrained.
When these points are considered, it is obvious that including behind-the-meter energy storage in the Future Homes Standard is important to meet the objective of reducing the impact of new buildings on the peak grid demand.
Government should mandate batteries
To address this, the Future Homes Standard could easily be adjusted in several ways. For example, energy stored in a battery and used on site could be rewarded through the metrics which will govern compliance with the standard, for example, by giving stored energy a beneficial Primary Energy Factor. If the Government is serious about moving to a clean energy future, they should go further and mandate solar batteries.
Could there be a simple disconnect between the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero, and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government? If this is a standard for all new homes there is a level playing field for housebuilders, and the extra investment in renewable energy technology is largely funded by the public within the most efficient financing package available to them, the mortgage.
Even better, technology exists to optimise the home energy systems automatically so that customers can be rewarded for the savings without having to compromise their lifestyle.
If the importance of solar and battery storage is ignored, over time consumers will have to pay significantly more. Homeowners with new homes will have lower financial return from solar PV if it cannot generate when the network is overloaded with solar energy and they will miss out on energy savings in the evening.
The cost of retrofitting technologies such as solar and energy storage is much greater than installing them during the initial construction when they can be financed at very low costs. Customers will not benefit from the additional energy security provided by solar and storage – so will remain more dependent on imported fossil fuels. It will be harder and more expensive for the Government to achieve its Clean Power by 2030 objective.
We urge the Government to mandate solar panels on all new houses, and reward energy storage in the Future Homes Standard.
Image credit: Powervault