UK plug-in solar dataset
Free · CC BY 4.0 JSON · version 1.4
Last verified: 1 August 2026 · DIY-route note updated: 2 September 2026
null, not an estimate.
Get it
Endpoint
https://balconysolarhub.co.uk/data/uk-plug-in-solar.json
One file, no key, no rate limit, CORS-open. UTF-8 without a byte-order mark, so json.load and JSON.parse both work without special handling.
Why this exists
Plug-in solar becomes lawful in Great Britain on 27 August 2026. In the days around that date a great deal will be written about it, and most of it will repeat two claims that our own reading of the primary sources does not support.
The first is that the law applies uniformly across the UK. It does not. Regulations 1 and 2 of SI 2026/848 extend to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Regulation 3 — the one that amends the Electricity Safety, Quality and Continuity Regulations 2002 — extends only to England and Wales and Scotland.
The second is that notifying your network operator is something you can simply do. The 28-day deadline is real and it is national: EREC G98 section 1.1, made under regulation 22(2)(c) of the Electricity Safety, Quality and Continuity Regulations 2002 and the Health and Safety Executive's certificate of exemption of August 2008, requires that the operator is told no later than 28 days after commissioning. But read who it puts that duty on: “the Installer is required to ensure that the DNO is made aware”. The Energy Networks Association's own guide is blunter still — “Your installer must notify the DNO… This is a legal requirement.”
Three things are on the record, and we are going to state them without joining them up for you. First, EREC G98 puts the duty to notify on the installer. Second, SI 2026/848 — the instrument that makes these devices lawful, which we read in full on 1 August 2026 — does not mention EREC G98, network operator notification, or any connection procedure. Third, UK Power Networks, the largest operator by licence area, says on its installer portal that “only approved installers can use Smart Connect on behalf of customers” and on its consumer guidance that “only installers can notify us on behalf of customers”.
What that means for someone who fits a plug-in device themselves is not something any source we have read answers. The dataset records it as an open question — applies_to_diy_householder is null — rather than resolving it. That unanswered question is why we built this.
This is a factual record of what each source states. It is not legal advice, and it is not a statement of what you are required to do. Every value carries the URL it came from and the date we read it, so you can check all of it yourself.
What is in it
1. The legislation
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
si_number | 2026 No. 848 |
made_date | 16 July 2026 |
laid_before_parliament | 17 July 2026 |
in_force_date | 27 August 2026 |
wattage_cap_w | 800 — “maximum rated alternating current output not exceeding 800 watts” |
extent | Split: regs 1–2 include Northern Ireland, reg 3 does not |
battery_storage_excluded | true — see below |
addresses_dno_notification | false — the instrument never mentions G98 |
The battery point is easy to miss. The statutory definition of a plug-in microgenerator requires that the device is “not designed to import electrical energy from a low voltage consumer’s installation for the purpose of storing energy for later supply”. A plug-in system with a battery that charges from the household supply therefore falls outside the definition. The dataset carries all five conditions verbatim so you can check that yourself.
2. The network operators
Six operator groups covering fourteen distribution licence areas, keyed by MPAN distributor ID so you can join it to a meter.
| Operator | Licence areas | Deadline | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK Power Networks | 10, 12, 19 | 28 days | Its own pages. It states on both its installer portal and its consumer guidance that only installers can notify it on behalf of customers |
| National Grid Electricity Distribution | 11, 14, 21, 22 | 28 days | Its own G98 notification page, stated twice |
| Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks | 17, 20 | 28 days | Its own MPAN process document |
| Electricity North West | 16 | 28 days | Its own Form B completion guide |
| Northern Powergrid | 15, 23 | 28 days | Its own micro-generation page. That page times out on automated fetch, so the quote was read in a browser and the record says so |
| SP Energy Networks | 13, 18 | 30 days | Its own page — for the commissioning confirmation form. It separately wants notice before or at commissioning |
Every deadline above is 28 days except one, so the number itself is not the story. All six now carry deadline_source of stated on the operator's own page — the field exists because that was not true of an earlier version of this dataset, and it lets you tell a published figure from an inherited one. The dataset also gives you route_open_to_householder, which is false for UK Power Networks, because it states so on two of its own pages, and null for the other five, because they do not address the question. No operator is recorded as true: none of them states that a customer may notify without an installer, and we are not treating silence, or a form field that reads “Customer/Installer”, as permission. Each record also carries g98_notify_url, the HTTP status we saw, the date of that check, the verbatim quote, and fee — null for every operator, because none states one and we are not going to infer that it is free.
Per-operator files
If you only care about one network, take one file. Each is self-contained — it repeats the limits and the legislation summary so you do not have to fetch the parent dataset as well.
Index — includes an MPAN lookup
/data/dno/index.json
One per operator
/data/dno/uk-power-networks.json/data/dno/national-grid-electricity-distribution.json/data/dno/sp-energy-networks.json/data/dno/northern-powergrid.json/data/dno/electricity-north-west.json/data/dno/scottish-and-southern-electricity-networks.json
The index carries mpan_lookup, keyed by distributor ID 10 to 23. The first two digits of a UK meter’s MPAN identify the distributor, so you can go straight from a meter to the right operator file:
idx = requests.get(".../data/dno/index.json").json()
slug = idx["mpan_lookup"]["16"] # -> "electricity-north-west"
dno = requests.get(f".../data/dno/{slug}.json").json()
dno["notification"]["deadline_days"] # -> 28
dno["notification"]["deadline_source"] # -> where that 28 actually comes from3. Technical limits — two caps, not one
800 W is the product cap. It decides whether a device counts as a plug-in microgenerator under SI 2026/848.
3.68 kW (16 A per phase) is the process cap. It decides whether your connection can use the G98 route rather than G99.
They are frequently reported as though they were the same number, or as though one supersedes the other. The dataset keeps them in separate fields with separate sources so that cannot happen.
Coverage and what is deliberately missing
- Northern Ireland is out of scope for the operator section, and says so explicitly in
coverage.northern_ireland. It does not appear in the Energy Networks Association licence area table, and regulation 3 does not extend there. We would rather declare the gap than fill it with a guess. - No notification deadline is
nullany more. An earlier version of this dataset recorded four of them asnull. That was wrong: the 28 days is set nationally by EREC G98 and applies whether or not an operator restates it, and every one of those four does in fact state it — in a PDF, or on a page we had not reached, or on a page that will not load for an automated client. Corrected on 1 August 2026, the day it was published.deadline_sourcenow records where each figure comes from, and one record carries averification_notebecause it was read in a browser rather than fetched. - One form reference is left unresolved on purpose. Northern Powergrid's page refers to Form A3-2, while its own forms page publishes G98 Form B for single-premises microgeneration, and other operators list A3-2 among their G99 forms. Both references are recorded in
form_reference_discrepancywithresolved: false. Harmonising them would have looked tidier and told you less. applies_to_diy_householderis stillnull, and the note now says why. EREC G98 puts the duty on the installer and is unchanged. What changed is that a published route now exists: the Energy Networks Association runs a registration portal at myplugin.solar, read 2 September 2026, whose FAQ states that registering the device there sends the notification to your DNO. We left the fieldnullrather than setting ittrue, because the field asks what EREC G98 requires of that person — and G98 still does not say.- Every fee is
null. No page consulted states a charge for a single-premises G98 notification. Absence of a stated fee is not evidence of no fee. bs7671_amendmentisnull. BS 7671 is a paid standard and we have no primary access to it. We are not citing a number we have not read.
Example
curl -s https://balconysolarhub.co.uk/data/uk-plug-in-solar.json \
| python -c "import sys,json; d=json.load(sys.stdin); \
print(d['legislation']['in_force_date'], d['legislation']['wattage_cap_w']); \
[print(x['dno_short'], x['notification_deadline_days']) \
for x in d['dno_notification']['dnos']]"Licence and citation
Published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Use it commercially, change it, build on it — just credit it.
Archived at Zenodo, with a DOI. This dataset is deposited in Zenodo, the open research repository operated by CERN. It has a permanent digital object identifier, so a citation to it keeps working even if this site does not:
10.5281/zenodo.21752864 — concept DOI: always resolves to the newest version
The Zenodo deposit is at version 1.3; the live files are at 1.4. Cite the DOI for the archived snapshot, the live URL for the current file.
Citing this dataset? Copy the line below.
Dimitriadis, N. (2026). UK Plug-In Solar: DNO Notification Requirements by Licence Area (Version 1.3) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21752864
Or cite the live page — use this if you want the reader to reach the current data rather than the archived snapshot:
BalconySolarHub, “UK Plug-In Solar Dataset”, version 1.4, 2026. CC BY 4.0. https://balconysolarhub.co.uk/developers/
Sources
- SI 2026/848, full text — legislation.gov.uk
- Distribution licence areas — Energy Networks Association
- ENA Connect Direct — national submission route
- The six operators’ own G98 pages, listed with their URLs inside the dataset
Secondary sources — blogs, aggregators, news write-ups — were deliberately excluded. If a value could not be traced to a primary source it is null.
Found something wrong? Tell us — corrections are published in the changelog, not made silently.