Energy secretary Ed Miliband has announced the first project that Great British Energy, a publicly owned company, will undertake.
A £200 million investment from the UK government and GB Energy will see the company work with schools and the NHS to install rooftop solar PV on a total of 400 sites, delivering between 70MW and 100MW of solar generation.
In England around £80 million in funding will support around 200 schools, alongside £100 million for nearly 200 NHS sites, with the first solar systems to be installed by the end of summer 2025.
Additionally, local authorities and community energy groups will be supported by about £12 million to build clean energy projects, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has announced.
A further £9.3 million will power schemes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland including community energy or rooftop solar for public buildings.
Beyond supporting the government’s clean power 2030 target, solar PV arrays will save money for the buildings upon which they are installed. The announcement also states that electricity generated by the solar installations could be sold back to the grid, facilitated by battery energy storage systems (BESS) that could also be covered by the investment.
The NHS is the biggest public sector energy user, spending roughly £1.4 billion each year, a figure that has almost doubled since 2019.
According to Miliband, GB Energy’s “first major project” will save “vital public institutions hundreds of millions on bills to reinvest on the frontline”.
DESNZ predicts lifetime savings for schools and the NHS of up to £400 million over around 30 years.
Jess Ralston, energy analyst at the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), called GB Energy’s funding “essentially government investment into lower energy bills for the NHS and schools”.
Chair of the energy company, Juergen Maier, said that partnering with the public sector as GB Energy scales up will help it to make “an immediate impact”.
Previous moves that the company has made have suggested its key focus will be offshore generation technologies, including partnerships with the Crown Estate and Crown Estate Scotland and the appointment of Dan McGrail, who heads up the trade body representing businesses developing wind, wave, tidal, storage and green hydrogen projects in the UK.
News of the project follows the first meeting of the Great British Energy start-up board on 17 March.
Some of the hospitals involved in the scheme will have the largest rooftop installations in the country: the installation at Chesterfield Royal Hospital is estimated to have over 4MW capacity. Others will install ground-mounted solar PV in carparks, rather than on the rooftop.
Solar Energy UK, the trade body representing the solar industry, praised the decision, adding that it also welcomes the support for community energy “which commonly backs solar projects on the public estate”.
