We use cookies to allow us and selected partners to improve your experience and our advertising. By continuing to browse you consent to our use of cookies. You can understand more and change your cookies preferences here.
The Smart Export Guarantee (SEG) pays customers for renewable electricity they have generated and put into the grid. It replaces the Feed-in Tariff (FIT) scheme, which pays many solar panel owners for the electricity they generate at home. Big energy companies have had to participate in the SEG since the beginning of 2020.
Read on to find out if you can get an SEG tariff for your home's renewable energy system, and how much you could earn.
The Smart Export Guarantee pays households for the excess renewable electricity they generate but don’t use themselves. The electricity can be produced by the following renewable technologies:
The government said that homes putting excess renewable electricity into the grid are guaranteed payment for it under the new scheme. But you have to sign up to a SEG tariff with a company, otherwise you won’t get paid for your electricity and will export any you generate but don’t use to the National Grid for free.
Find out whether solar panels would be right for your home.
Installing renewable generation technology and signing up to an SEG tariff will help you use more renewable electricity and should help you save money on it in the long term. However, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to make money from the SEG to the extent that some solar panel owners initially could from the FIT.
This is because the SEG pays only for excess electricity put into the grid, rather than all the electricity that's generated.
Companies set their own SEG tariff prices, so you’ll need to shop around to make sure you get a price you’re happy with. Companies must pay more than zero, but there can be big differences between the best and the worst. When we checked widely available tariffs in November 2020, we found companies paying between 1p/kWh and 5.5p/kWh (or even as much as 11p/kWh if you choose a tariff that requires you to have a specific battery).
This means more than a 5-fold difference in your payments, which would add up over a year if you export a lot of electricity to the grid.
Based export tariffs available in November 2020 that don't require a specific battery, and a system generating 3,000kWh electricity per year, and the household exporting 1,500kWh of that.
The figures above are an illustration only, based on a 4kWp system exporting 1,975kWh of electricity to the grid in a year. For context, the average medium use household uses 2,900kWh electricity over a year.
On top of this, you would expect to save money on your electricity bill as you’d be using renewable power generated at home and therefore buying less from the grid. As illustrated below, you may even save more from having to buy less from the grid than you could earn from exporting the excess electricity you generate.
Our calculations only include SEG tariffs that don't require you to have a specific battery, allowing you to switch to them from another provider more easily. Battery-specific tariffs may pay higher rates, as we highlight in more detail below.
Your individual bill savings and SEG earnings will depend on:
So if you’re considering installing renewable generation, take these into account against the cost of installing the system and maintenance costs to work out how long it’ll take your system to pay for itself.
Find out more about solar PV maintenance .
If you fit a home battery, you’ll be able to store and use more of the electricity you have generated, helping you save more on your electricity bill. However, different tariffs have different rules around whether they’ll pay for electricity stored in a battery, especially if some of it could be ‘brown’ electricity from the grid.
Check what your chosen SEG company’s rules are. If they’ll pay for stored electricity then you could earn more with a flexible tariff by storing electricity to export at times when rates are higher. But you’ll also need to take into account the initial cost of the battery.
Read more about solar panels and energy storage .
All companies with more than 150,000 customers have to offer a SEG tariff. Smaller companies can choose to do so and some companies besides traditional energy companies have begun offering tariffs as well (including Tesla and Social Energy), so look out for different options available.
The biggest energy companies all offer SEG tariffs. Other companies with SEG customers include Avro Energy, Bulb, E, Green Network Energy, Octopus, OVO, Shell, Utilita and Utility Warehouse.
Companies with more than 150,000 customers must offer at least one SEG tariff that is export-only, and therefore available to all eligible installations, not just those of their customers. So you can often choose a different supplier to sell your renewable electricity to than the one that you buy electricity from.
However some firms will pay for your exports into your account with them if you are a customer, which might be convenient, and some tariffs may offer a better export rate if you buy your energy from the same company.
Electric car giant Tesla and smart storage firm Social Energy both sell SEG tariffs which require you to have a specific storage battery.
They pay the highest export rates but to access them you'll need to have Tesla's Powerwall battery or a battery approved by Social Energy.
Social Energy's SEG tariff pays 5.6p/kWh for electricity you export. It also uses some customers' batteries to help balance the National Grid, and pays credits in return.
Tesla has recently launched an SEG tariff for homes that have solar panels and its Powerwall electricity storage battery installed. You must buy electricity via the plan too, at the same rate you get for energy you export.
The rate for Tesla vehicle owners is 8p/kWh (who also have an EV charger installed at their home); it's 11p/kWh if you don’t have a Tesla vehicle.
Octopus Energy administers the tariff, which is called Tesla Energy Plan. It has no daily standing charge and you’ll need a smart meter to access it.
So far, we’ve seen two main types of Smart Export Guarantee tariffs:
Fixed rate SEGs have a set amount that they pay per kilowatt hour of electricity you export to the grid, regardless of when you export it. Most of the SEG tariffs on offer at the moment follow this pattern.
Flexible rate SEGs pay varying amounts depending on how valuable the electricity is to the system at different times. For example, the rates may be tied to day-ahead wholesale prices. So you could be paid more for exporting electricity at a time when there is a high demand for it (in the evening, for instance). Octopus Energy’s Outgoing Agile tariff is this type.
Companies might also offer multi-rate SEGs where there are different set rates for electricity exported at different times, such as day and night rates, or weekday and weekend rates.
The price you are paid must not be below zero at any time.
To complicate things, some companies are offering tariffs where the price (per kWh of electricity) is fixed for the duration of the contract, while others are offering variable rates. A variable rate means that they can change the price of the tariff depending on whether they want to pay more or less for your electricity. You should be given 30 days’ notice though.
If you install solar panels, a wind turbine, or other renewable generation at home, you should be able to sign up to a SEG tariff.
You’ll need to meet certain criteria though, including the following:
In practice, to provide half-hourly meter readings it's likely that you will need a smart meter. Although the government told us that it’s ‘still possible to enjoy the benefits of SEG without a smart meter’, you’ll need more than a traditional electricity meter because these cannot take half-hourly readings. Some advanced meters can do this or ‘any other type of export meter’, according to the government – but you’ll need to get one of these installed.
Find out more: what you need to know about smart meters .
But we’ve heard from Which? members who have been refused smart meters because of their solar panels. So make sure that you get a second-generation smart meter that can take export meter readings if you’re considering installing renewable technology.
MCS certification involves choosing a product and using an installer that are approved by the microgeneration certification scheme (MCS). This is a quality-assurance scheme for renewable technologies, meaning that companies and product meet high standards. Find out more about the MCS here .
If you have installed solar panels or another renewable system since the FIT closed, you should be able to sign up with a supplier offering SEG payments as long as you meet the criteria. You won’t be able to claim back-payments before you signed up to an SEG tariff though.
The FIT paid households that produced their own electricity using renewable technologies. It closed to new applicants at the end of March 2019.
If you receive the FIT, you get two payments:
The SEG is one payment and is just for the electricity you export to the grid.
SEG payments are based on the measured amount of electricity exported to the grid. FIT payments were ‘deemed’ or estimated to be 50% of the total electricity generated.
The payment rates for the FIT were set by Ofgem and the government and were the same regardless of which supplier paid you. SEG tariff rates are set by the companies which offer them.
The FIT was paid for by a levy on all customers’ energy bills. The SEG is paid by energy companies who buy the power.
If you're already signed up to receive FIT payments, you will continue to do so for the remainder of your contract (usually around 20 years). The SEG is aimed more at new renewable technology owners.
The FIT rates were very generous when the scheme first launched so it’s unlikely that you will earn as much from switching to a SEG tariff compared with your feed-in tariff.
SEG tariffs will pay you only for the exact amount of electricity you export, whereas feed-in tariffs estimated your export at 50% of what your system generated – meaning that if you used more than 50% of your electricity then you’d be even better off.
However, if you opt-out of receiving your FIT export payments, you can sign up to get SEG export payments instead.