In March 2026, 27,000 new solar installations were completed in Britain, marking the highest monthly deployment since 2012.
UK government figures show that across all types of deployment (domestic roofs, commercial and industrial and ground-mounted solar power stations), Britain surpassed two million solar installations in March.
A total of 22.1 GW has been installed in Great Britain, spread over 2,003,000 installations. Two-thirds of the installations consisted of PV on the roof of homes.
That revelation comes as solar power generation took place in April and subsequently broke several records. The government has achieved an 11.7% growth in installed solar capacity in Britain since March 2025, including the commissioning of Britain’s largest solar power plant, the 373MW Cleve Hill project, in June 2025.
In March 2026 alone, there were 27,607 installations adding 121 MW, the highest number in any calendar month since 2012. Of those, 66% were residential, for a capacity of 85 MW.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) shared the news and framed it around the response to the war in Iran. Several of the recent solar energy activities have been presented as such, although they were all in the pipeline before the energy crisis.
These include enabling the sale of plug-in solar panels in Great BritainAnd meet the Future Homes Standard to require that solar energy be installed as standard in new-build homes from 2028.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said of the figures: “This is our clean energy mission in action: helping families weather global energy shocks, cutting bills and getting Britain off the fossil fuel rollercoaster.”
He also highlighted the “success” of government energy company Great British Energy’s (GBE) solar scheme in deploying rooftop PV for public buildings, noting that from March this year Rooftop PV for 100 schools and colleges.
Source: British Government.
There has also been talk of one increase in consumer interest in domestic renewable technologies in response to rising energy bills due to the conflict in the Middle East. Commenting on the government’s solar installation figures, Jess Ralston, head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), suggested the March installation surge may have been reactive.
Ralston said the British public “clearly sees net zero technologies such as solar as the solution to energy bill volatility and protection against what has essentially been successive oil and gas crises”.
“They are voting with their feet on accelerating the clean transition through electrification – the logical way to protect households from rising oil and gas prices due to conflicts thousands of miles away,” she added.
While the majority of installations in Britain are domestic, the government allocates only 30% of total capacity to this segment. This is still an increase compared to previous years, as total capacity has been approximately 25% since 2016.
Government figures show that at the end of March 2026, at least 38% of capacity (8.4 GW) came from ground-mounted or standalone solar installations. This includes 25 operational solar power plants with CfDs, of which 19 came online in 2025 and four in 2026. The UK government’s database is based on its own research among major power producers (MPPs), the Renewable Energy Planning Database (REPD), the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) database and the databases subsidized by the Renewables Obligation (RO), Feed-in Tariff (FiT) and Contracts for Difference (CfD).
Several power stations from the built-in capacity registers of the distribution system operators (DNO) and from Ofgem’s REGO (Renewable Energy Guarantee of Origin) dataset are included. However, the statistics currently do not include all non-subsidized solar installations with a capacity of less than 150 kW that are not included in these data sources.
