As part of a package of measures intended to lessen the impact of rising gas prices on consumer energy bills, introduced by the UK government, plug-in solar panels will be sold in retail majors, including Lidl and Amazon.
While the government said it planned to explore the technology’s use in the UK when it published the UK Solar Roadmap back in June 2025, it has sped up measures in response to fears of another energy crisis.
This means that the BS 7671 wiring rules and the G98 code, which governs the smallest-scale connections to the grid, have been amended. Plug-in solar panels with capacity up to 800 watts will be available to purchase.
The inverter plugs into a domestic property’s mains electricity using a standard 3-pin plug, hence the name, without requiring intervention by an electrician. The technology is ideal for properties that do not have access to rooftop PV installations, or in future won’t be built with solar installed per the Future Homes Standard.
The government’s messaging about the change notes that plug-in solar is already being deployed widely in Germany. After the government there streamlined the registration process in April 2024, deployment of the technology, also known as ‘balcony solar’ saw a significant uptick.
In H1 of that year, 200MW balcony solar was deployed across around 220,000 systems, according to figures from the German Federal Network Agency, the Bundesnetzagentur. The country surpassed one million installations in June 2025, according to data from German trade body BSW Solar.
Per a report on our sister site, PV Tech, published in 2024, small-scale installations like balcony systems particularly benefit from higher efficiency and higher power modules. Often, interdigitated back contact (IBC) or heterojunction technology (HJT) modules are the technology of choice for these distributed installations, as they offer the greatest conversion efficiency for the available space.
More recently, the California Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee has unanimously voted 14-0 (and 3 abstentions) in favour of a bill for balcony solar.
In the approach taken by that new legislation, Senate Bill 868 (SB 868) – also known as the Plug and Play Solar Act – would allow people in California to install small systems of up to 1,200 watts (AC) to a building’s electrical system and exempt them from being required to interconnect the small systems to the electrical distribution system.
These developments chime with predictions by energy market analyst Wood Mackenzie for 2026, with one of three market trends it expected to see being a boost for balcony solar. Read more about that on PV Tech.