Market
The UK has passed 2.5 million MCS-certified installations across solar, battery storage and heat pumps combined, half a million more than the solar-only two million milestone we covered in May
Segen's milestone counts every MCS-certified renewable technology together rather than solar alone, and the gap between the two figures is itself informative: battery storage and heat pump attachment rates are climbing fast enough to add half a million certified installs on top of solar in a matter of months.
31 July 2026 · Source: Segen UK
It's worth being precise about what this number actually counts, because it's easy to misread as a bigger solar milestone than it is. Two million was solar PV installations specifically. 2.5 million is solar, battery storage and heat pumps combined under the MCS certification scheme. The honest way to read the gap is that roughly half a million non-solar-only certified installs, batteries retrofitted to existing solar systems, heat pumps installed alongside or independently of PV, have stacked up in a market that is diversifying beyond panels-only builds.
For anyone specifying a new system today, that diversification is the more useful signal than either headline number on its own. A market where battery attachment is growing fast enough to move a combined milestone meaningfully is a market where battery costs, installer familiarity and product choice are all maturing in parallel, which is exactly the condition under which battery-plus-solar becomes the default recommendation rather than the upsell it was three or four years ago.
MCS certification itself is the quality floor underneath all of this growth, and it is not optional if you want either warranty protection or access to schemes like the Smart Export Guarantee. Every one of the 2.5 million counted here went through an installer and product certification process specifically so that a rapidly scaling market doesn't also become a rapidly scaling source of botched installs, which matters more the faster the volume climbs.
The practical takeaway for a Kent household weighing a system now is less about the round number and more about what it implies for the supply chain behind it: more certified installers, more product choice, more competitive pricing on batteries specifically, all of which are downstream effects of a market growing at the rate this milestone describes. That's a better market to buy into than the smaller, thinner one that existed when solar-only installations first crossed a million.
Read the original: Segen UK. Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.
More solar news
- ECO4 has been given a final nine-month extension to 31 December 2026, but the government has confirmed there will be no successor supplier obligation scheme after it closes
- The highest SEG export rate on the UK market right now, Octopus Intelligent Flux at up to 32.17p per kWh, is only available if you have a battery and an Octopus import tariff, which tells you where export income is actually heading
- 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
- Grid connection delays, not installer availability, are now the real bottleneck for UK solar, with some South East England DNO applications taking 20 to 24 weeks instead of the standard 4 to 8