Edgware is a town the borough boundary cuts in two, with a ward called Edgware in Barnet and another in Harrow, and an HA8 postcode district that reaches into Brent as well. For the electricity network, though, the line makes no difference: Edgware town centre sits in UK Power Networks’ Eastern Power Networks area on both sides of it. This guide covers what that means when you add a battery, from the G98 and G99 paperwork to export limits, and gives the plain truth about what a battery does in a power cut. For our wider approach to storage here, see our page on battery storage in Edgware.
One distinction first. The network operator, UK Power Networks, owns the cables and substations. It is not your energy supplier, and changing supplier does not change it.
Which network Edgware is on
On UK Power Networks’ own licence-boundary data, Edgware town centre falls inside its Eastern Power Networks licence area, on the Barnet side and the Harrow side alike. That is the network your installer deals with for most Edgware addresses. Licence boundaries are drawn on maps, not streets, so UKPN’s postcode checker is the way to confirm the operator for your own home, whether you are in Burnt Oak, Canons Park or Edgwarebury.
G98 or G99: what decides it
Every battery that can export electricity goes through the same connection rules as solar panels. Under the Energy Networks Association’s G98 standard, type-tested equipment up to 16 A per phase, which is 3.68 kW on a single-phase supply, is notified to the network operator before commissioning or no later than 28 days after it. Anything larger needs a G99 application, approved before the work starts.
The line is lower than many people expect. A 4 kW inverter runs at 17.39 A, just over it, so a solar-and-battery system in an Edgware semi can easily land on the G99 side. That is not a problem in itself; it is a different form, filled in earlier. UK Power Networks’ Smart Connect service handles G98 and G99 forms for battery storage as well as solar PV, and only approved installers can use it. The installer does this on your behalf.
Export limits and the 5 kW figure
UK Power Networks says it automatically approves home solar and storage applications where the maximum export, after any export limitation scheme, is under 5 kW. An export limit is a setting that caps how much the system can push onto the network at once, even if the inverter could deliver more to the house. It is one way a system with a larger inverter can stay under that 5 kW line. If your supply does need upgrading first, UKPN will say so; if it does not, there is nothing for you to pay UKPN.
The plain truth about power cuts
A standard grid-tied battery shuts down when the grid does. That is deliberate: it stops your system feeding power into a network that engineers may be working on. So a battery full of solar electricity will not, on its own, keep an Edgware home’s lights on in an outage.
Backup can be designed in. It changes the specification, the wiring and usually the price, and it can be designed for selected circuits or for the whole house. Our guide to battery storage without solar panels explains how backup fits into a design, and our post on the EnSmart SolarAll kit we fit sets out what its maker publishes about backup operation.
How often would it matter? Ofgem’s 2024/25 figures for Eastern Power Networks show about 44.6 supply interruptions per 100 customers and about 32.5 minutes lost per customer over the year. Those are averages across the whole licence area, as reported before Ofgem’s final assessment, not a forecast for your street. They are a reason to ask yourself honestly whether backup is worth paying for, not a reason to fear the grid.
Edgware’s semis and the paperwork
Semi-detached houses are the commonest home in all three Edgware wards: 39.0% of households in Barnet’s Edgware ward, 49.6% in Edgwarebury and 48.3% in Harrow’s Edgware ward (Census 2021). A semi with its own roof is exactly the kind of home where a solar-and-battery system pushes past 3.68 kW and into G99, so expect your installer to apply before fitting rather than notify afterwards. On the Harrow side, batteries are hardly new: Harrow’s climate strategy records 285 households committing to panels through the 2021 and 2022 Solar Together London rounds, 139 of them with batteries.
Planning is a separate track and does change at the boundary. The Canons Park Estate, on the Harrow side, carries an Article 4 direction whose wording decides whether roof panels are caught; the Watling Estate in Burnt Oak, on the Barnet side, has none in Barnet’s records.
Next steps
For the roof itself, see our solar panels in Edgware page, and for the area around it our solar panels in North London hub. If you are next door in Harrow and an electric car is part of the plan, our guide to EV, solar and a battery in Harrow covers how the three fit together. When you would like a survey that covers the network paperwork as well as the roof, use our contact page.
Sources: UK Power Networks Open Data, licence boundaries dataset (town-centre point checks, both sides of the boundary); UK Power Networks, Smart Connect and Solar and storage: cost, time and what’s involved; Energy Networks Association, EREC G98 Issue 2 (10 March 2025); Ofgem, RIIO-2 Electricity Distribution annual report 2024 to 2025 and supplementary datafile (reliability); ONS Census 2021, TS044 accommodation type, Edgware (Barnet), Edgwarebury and Edgware (Harrow) wards, via Nomis; postcodes.io (ONS Postcode Directory), HA8 outcode; London Borough of Harrow, Living Harrow: Climate and Nature Strategy 2023–2030, section 2.1.3, and Stanmore and Edgware conservation areas; planning.data.gov.uk, London Borough of Barnet conservation-area and Article 4 datasets.