13th August, 2025
PV… or not PV? That is the question.
Paul Bainbridge, Technical Director
Paul’s Greenprints 
Look, we know you’ve been lapping up our previous blogs all centred around the Government’s plans to make new homes Zero Carbon Ready under the Future Homes Standard, and we know you’ve delighted in every single one of them in the process. But that doesn’t mean that when it comes to those new regulations (and what they mean for you as our wonderful clients) that you don’t also have questions.
And the most pressing of those questions?
We’ve got you.
PV… or not PV?
Yep, that really is the question.
You see, when we talk about Zero Carbon Ready homes with their Air Source Heat Pumps and energy efficient fabric specifications, we couldn’t possibly not talk about Photovoltaic cells and roofing, now could we?
The two options regarding PV put forward under consultation for the Future Homes Standard – because they always like to give two options – were quite simply either Option 1: 40% PV on roofing (that percentage being based on the ground floor area of the new home), or, Option 2: Absolutely no PV whatsoever.
Under Option 1, new homes would benefit from the placing of PV cells that would convert sunlight directly into electricity. Great news for the plan to become Zero Carbon Ready (see blog 4), but not a definite green-lighter given the fact that the cost may outweight the benefit and hit a point of saturation (see blog 5).
Let’s also look at this from a PR point of view. Option 1 would be more costly to the developers to design and build, but comes with subsequent lower running/energy costs for the homeowner. In other words, Option 1 makes you very popular with the general electorate. Option 2 would be the opposite, of course, as whilst it wouldn’t add costs for the developer (no work needed), it does mean that anyone hoping to buy a new home is not being treated to the most energy-efficient and cost-saving of dwellings at the point of purchase. This is never going to be great PR for the Government, so we can understand why they might want to push for Option 1.
Here at The FES Group, we’re known for being bold and straight down the line with our (carefully chosen) clients and with our (carefully measured) thinking, and so we kind of respect the ‘go big or go home’ variance in these two options, here. Option 1 goes big because it potentially leaves developers with a massive headache dealing with supply chain, cost, design restrictions, and availability of appropriate roof space to host the 40% PV, and Option 2 goes home because it does, well, nothing at all to help the dwelling generate their own clean energy in pursuit of being Zero Carbon Ready.
And so, as your favourite sustainability specialists in the construction sector, we’ll go ahead and maintain that an Option 1.5 somewhere in the middle would always be the most sensible, workable, and impactful option, here. Yes, you might roll your eyes that we always have to be ‘difficult’ with this, but you have to admit, we’re always absolutely right with the things we propose. We’ve always advocated for a balanced approach and greater range of options within changing regulations in our presentations, our client consultations, and even over a pint down the pub (yes, we geek out over this stuff pretty much 24/7). Our Technical Director, Paul, is proving to be so ‘on the money’ with the suggestions he puts forward and the predictions he makes ahead of the curve, that we’re starting to wonder why we’ve never seen him and Mystic Meg in the same room before now.
The Sunshine Bill (see our previous blog on that one) proposed that future homes needed 40% PV to be Zero Carbon Ready, but the Government dismissed this very early on as being far too high a figure for a number of reasons. The first was that the supply chain was likely to be fraught with issues, and the second was that it was going to add a lot of costs for developers. We can then add into this the issue of design constraints, houses that don’t face due south, dorma roofs… lots to consider and constrain. To overcome these issues under Option 1, either houses would need to be designed to all look the same (never any designer’s idea of fun, and not exactly a wow-factor for the homebuyer, either), or, houses of many different designs and positions would end up with weird and not so wonderful arrays of PV cells placed erratically all over them to suit space and efficacy, rather than style. So why the Government have now gone with this exact figure in their consultation, we have no idea. We’d probably suggest the figure of 20% for PV (as we did when we offered our thoughts on the Sunshine Bill), but more importantly, we’d clarify what that’s equivalent to in terms of power and production.
A 20% figure down the middle (instead of all or nothing) would have less impact on design and cost, and less need for random arrays of PV cell placement purely to meet compliance. We reduce the cost and therefore the work and supply chain demands involved, yet still give the developer every chance of being Zero Carbon Ready. Whilst the 40% might hit the point of saturation that we talk so much about, 20% really does provide the best of both worlds without becoming problematic.
What baffles us here at The FES Group, is that all parties – the developers, the Government, and the Great Buying Public – are seemingly not too bothered about the benefits that go beyond the cost in all of this, and instead are preferring to focus on the features. In other words, whilst it’s proposed (in Option 1, at least) that under the Future Homes Standard all new homes have 40% PV, what they’re not saying is that this equates to between a 90% and 100% reduction in carbon emissions! That’s right, folks, forget Zero Carbon Ready – this would be Zero Carbon Now! Prior to this consultation, the biggest step that’s ever been brought about thanks to changes in regulations and standards is a 31% reduction in emissions, so to effectively triple this is surely newsworthy and worth talking about (if not actively promoting). Whilst we can understand homebuyers simply hearing “Air Source Heat Pump” and actively feeling at ease that they’re saving the planet, it’s beyond us how developers and MPs alike aren’t screaming from the PV coated rooftops what this means for the part they’re playing in reaching Carbon Zero.
Anyway.
When this all comes out in an Approved Document and subsequent regulation update, people may perhaps expect monumental changes. But essentially, based on the two PV proposals, there’s a 50/50 chance that all that will change is that we no longer have gas boilers and instead have Air Source Heat Pumps. The fabric specs don’t really need to change because we’re at the point of saturation, as we’ve written about previously
And so, in essence, everything comes down to PV… or not PV. If the answer is not PV, then what the new regulations state isn’t really changing as mentioned.
How we assess things, however, absolutely is…
…but that’s a blog for another time.