Here comes the sun: Octopus boosts home offering with solar panels
Octopus Energy is wading into the solar installation market, bolstering its catalogue of green energy solutions for the home with photovoltaic panels.
The company’s engineering arm, Octopus Energy Services, will install solar panels, alongside electric vehicle chargers, air-source heat pumps and smart meters which it currently offers to customers.
The company is aiming to quickly ramp up the rollout, targeting 5,000 installations in 2023.
The new service is launching across the midlands and the south, with a view to expand nationwide within the first year.
Octopus customers will also be able to store the green energy they produce and sell it back to the grid – with a range of solar batteries available to buy.
It predicts a combination of solar panels and batteries could slash 90 per cent of household bills compared to customers on the conventional standard variable tariff.
This is because customers would have access to the “agile outgoing” tariff which links a household’s payments to wholesale energy prices that day.
The energy firm considers it the best value export tariff on the market.
Between September 2021 and September 2022, customers on this tariff were paid 34p/kWh on average, with payments going up to £1.29/kWh in the last year.
John Szymik, chief executive of Octopus Energy Services, said the company was “champing at the bit” to install solar panels, which he described as “the last piece of the puzzle”.
He said: “If more homes in the UK produce clean, green solar energy, we will be able to accelerate the energy transition and bring down system prices for everybody by lowering system costs.”
The government is targeting a vast ramp up in solar power generation over the coming decades, aiming to boost capacity from 14GW to 70GW by 2035 as part of its energy security strategy.