Solar energy projects
What a solar array actually produces in this part of the country, what happens to the units you do not use, and how the export side of it works.
What eastern England actually gives you
Lincolnshire is a good place to put solar on a roof. Eastern England is among the drier and sunnier parts of the country, the land is flat so there is very little shading from terrain, and clear coastal air helps once the sun is up. Generation is strongly seasonal, with the summer months producing several times what December and January manage, so a system should be sized around the year rather than around its best week.
Panels work from daylight rather than heat, which is why they keep producing on a cold bright day and why output holds up better through a Lincolnshire winter than people expect. Cool air actually helps, because module efficiency falls as the cells get hot. A still, baking July afternoon is not the best generating condition it looks like.
Self consumption is where the money is
A unit you generate and use yourself saves you the full retail price of buying it. A unit you export earns whatever your export tariff pays, which is normally a good deal less. So the single biggest lever on what a system is worth is not its size, it is the proportion of its output you actually consume rather than send back.
That is why timing matters. Running the washing machine, the dishwasher or the car charger through the middle of the day rather than the evening changes the economics without changing the hardware. It is also the argument for storage, which is covered on the battery storage page.
Getting paid for what you export
The Smart Export Guarantee is the mechanism that pays for exported units. Under the Ofgem scheme, every licensed electricity supplier with 150,000 or more domestic customers has to offer at least one export tariff, and the rate has to be greater than zero. Beyond that the suppliers set their own rates, which is why they vary so widely and why it is worth checking rather than defaulting to whoever supplies your import.
To claim it the installation has to be certified under the Microgeneration Certification Scheme or an equivalent. That certificate is issued at handover and it is the document your supplier will ask for, so it is worth keeping somewhere you can find it.
