When John Topham first thought about putting solar panels on his roof in north Wales, the numbers didn’t quite make sense. It was November 2021, and although energy bills in the UK had just risen by 12 percent, the money he’d save on his monthly bill wasn’t enough to justify the thousands of pounds it would cost to kit out his house with solar panels and battery storage. “At the time, we couldn’t get the finances to stack up,” says Topham, an aviation engineer.
But then the energy crisis really started to bite. In February 2022 the UK’s energy regulator announced that its Wired - Science