On 3 October 2026 Energy UK, the trade body for energy suppliers, called on the government to act on bills before winter. Its chief executive, Dhara Vyas, said: “We cannot afford to wait for the same scale of crisis before acting again. We must heed the lessons from that time,” and warned that “last-minute emergency interventions run the risk of being badly targeted and costing us all more”.
What it asked for
- Targeted support over and above the £150 Warm Home Discount, using existing data to find struggling households, as a step towards a discounted social tariff.
- A debt relief scheme for the worst-affected households, within a wider strategy to stop debt building up. Energy UK expects customer debt to reach a record £7 billion by the end of the year, and says the cost of bad debt already adds an average of £67 a year to everyone’s bills.
- Moving more levies off electricity bills into general taxation, starting with the Renewables Obligation and the Feed-in Tariff, as part of a wider move to electrification.
Energy UK accepted that the government has already acted — VAT came off electricity bills on 1 October and some levies were moved earlier in the year — but said high wholesale prices had wiped those savings out. The context is a 4% cap rise on 1 October, worth about £60 a year, and Cornwall Insight’s forecast that the January cap would reach £1,999 for a typical dual-fuel household. Energy UK’s own projection is a little higher, at around £2,100.
The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, told the BBC that the cost of home energy was “very difficult indeed” and that the government was “looking at any measure that can give people breathing space, that can take the pressure off”. Nothing has been announced.
What it means for plug-in solar
Here is the part that is genuinely two-sided, and worth understanding if you are weighing up a kit.
A plug-in system saves you money in one way only: it cuts the electricity you buy while it is generating. The saving is the unit rate multiplied by the kWh you use at home as they are produced. It does nothing about the standing charge, and nothing about debt costs recovered through bills.
- A January rise would increase the value of a kit. Same panels, same output, more money saved per kWh — though January is the worst month of the year for generation, so the effect lands mostly later in the year.
- Moving levies off electricity would reduce it. A lower unit rate means each self-used kWh is worth less. That is a smaller saving on a smaller bill, which is a good outcome for a household overall and a worse one for the payback sum on a kit.
- Targeted support and debt relief would not change the arithmetic at all. They change what a household pays, not the rate a kit offsets.
None of this is a reason to act now. These are a trade body’s requests, not decisions, and the January cap is not announced until late November. Our calculator uses the cap actually in force — 26.32p per kWh from 1 October to 31 December 2026 — and will follow any change at the next rebuild. If you want to see how sensitive the answer is to the unit rate, enter a different rate yourself and compare.
For the forecast itself see the January price cap forecast, and for the cap in force see October’s price cap and plug-in solar savings.