Heva Energy has launched what it calls the UK’s first salary sacrifice scheme for residential solar panels, home batteries and EV charge points, allowing employees to fund clean energy systems from pre-tax salary and cut household energy bills by up to half. The scheme requires no upfront payment and no credit check, with net monthly costs starting at £75. The NHS and The National Lottery Community Fund are among early participating employers.
The structure is lifted from the UK’s EV salary sacrifice boom. Payments come off gross pay before income tax and National Insurance, removing the upfront cost that, according to Heva, 80 per cent of households see as the main barrier to going solar. A 40 per cent taxpayer saves 42 per cent on the cost of an equivalent system bought outright or on consumer finance at 12 per cent APR. For employees still repaying a student loan, the saving climbs above 50 per cent, since the 9 per cent loan deduction also drops off the sacrificed portion of salary.
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What matters to both employers and employees is that the scheme pays for itself from day one. An employee earning £60,000 with a company EV and high household consumption pays £123 a month net for a full solar and 20 kWh battery package, while saving £171 a month on energy. For households where solar is not an option, a battery-only package stores cheap off-peak electricity and discharges it at peak times, typically halving the bill.
“Energy price disruption is not short-term. It is a structural shift, and most households have no mechanism to protect themselves from it,” said Ian Napier, co-founder of Heva Energy. “Consumer finance for solar locks you into credit checks and 12 per cent interest rates, while salary sacrifice removes both barriers and offers the deepest savings for those who need them most. We have seen demand triple in a month.”
The employer proposition
Employers carry no financial risk and save around £2,500 in National Insurance contributions per participating employee per year, while reducing Scope 3 emissions by 1.3 tonnes per head. Onboarding to first installation takes around two months. Hardware is Tesla Powerwall and EcoFlow, with installers vetted by Heva and a 21-day repair-or-replace SLA included as standard.
Ryan Griffin, MD of Yorkshire window-film specialist OVAGLAS Group, piloted the scheme on himself before opening it to staff. He took a 6 kW array with a Tesla Powerwall 3 and expansion pack, 27 kWh of storage in total, for a net cost of £8,700 against a retail price of around £17,000. More than half his eligible workforce has since signed up. The launch comes against a backdrop of doubled energy bills, the end of the ECO4 grant in March, and a Warm Homes Plan whose zero-interest solar loans will not be fully operational until 2027.
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“We already use salary sacrifice for electric vehicles,” said Zobair Mehmood of The National Lottery Community Fund. “Extending that mechanism to solar and batteries was the most direct way to protect our people from rising bills while making real progress on our net zero commitments.”
For all its British tax quirks, the scheme gets at something most European markets are still trying to solve: how to take the upfront cost out of home solar. (TF)
