Grants
The government opened a call for evidence on community battery storage on 4 June 2026, asking whether shared street-level batteries could let renters and flat-dwellers benefit from solar-style savings without installing anything themselves
The call for evidence, which closes on 30 July 2026, covers bill savings and system benefits, technical and financial barriers, safety frameworks, and what government support could scale community batteries up to help households, including low-income ones, who can't access a domestic battery for technical or financial reasons.
30 July 2026 · Source: GOV.UK
A community battery works at street or neighbourhood level rather than on an individual roof: it stores excess solar generated locally and lets multiple households draw on it when grid electricity is expensive, without any of them needing their own battery, or in some models, their own panels either. It's aimed squarely at the households solar and battery schemes have historically left out, renters, flat-dwellers, anyone without a suitable roof or the capital for their own system.
The timing is worth flagging precisely: this call for evidence closes on 30 July 2026, which is essentially now. It's a call for evidence, not a funded scheme, so nothing changes for households immediately, but it's the government formally gathering the barriers and case studies that would need to exist before any actual community battery programme gets designed. Whether it turns into real funding, and on what timeline, depends entirely on what this evidence-gathering stage produces.
For homeowners already running their own solar and battery setup, this doesn't compete with what you have, it's aimed at a different population entirely. But it's a useful signal about where policy attention is heading: government is actively looking at how to spread solar's practical benefits beyond the households that can already afford a full installation, which is the kind of context worth knowing when weighing how the broader UK solar and storage policy landscape might shift over the next few years.
Worth watching for the response to this call for evidence once DESNZ publishes it, since that will be the first real indication of whether community batteries move from a genuine but early-stage idea to an actual funded programme, and if so, on what kind of timeline relative to the Warm Homes Plan's other strands already covered on this site.
Read the original: GOV.UK. Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.
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