2038 is the year the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames has set for a net-zero borough, eight years after its target for the council’s own operations. A date on a strategy is not money in your pocket, though, and if you are pricing a home battery in Kingston, the useful question is narrower: what does the council, or anyone else, actually offer you this year?
The short answer is advice from the council, a VAT saving for everyone, and income-linked grants for some. Below we go through each, with the status exactly as we found it. For what a battery involves on a Kingston home, from where it goes to how it connects, see our page on battery storage in Kingston upon Thames.
What Kingston Council has committed to
The council declared a Climate Emergency in June 2019. Its Climate Action Plan was first approved in March 2022 and refreshed in 2024 as Kingston’s Climate Action Strategy 2024–2030, supported by a Net Zero 2030 Strategy dated February 2024. The two headline targets are net zero for the council’s own operations by 2030 and a net-zero borough by 2038.
For a household, the most concrete thing the council publishes is its Energy Saving Hub on kingston.gov.uk, which it calls its one stop shop for home energy advice. It is a sensible first stop before any quote, ours included. On planning, the council’s own guidance says permission is “not usually needed” for roof solar, and it offers Lawful Development Certificates for anyone in its 26 conservation areas who wants that in writing.
What happened to Solar Together in Kingston
In February 2021 the council announced a partnership with Solar Together, the group-buying scheme that offered residents group-priced solar PV with optional battery storage. The wider London programme has fitted over 3,000 homes across five phases. Since then it has been rebranded under Switch Together, and London City Hall’s page discloses that an installer company on the programme failed, with iChoosr handling refunds and completions.
So we treat it as a past scheme in Kingston, not an open offer. If a new London round opens, a group price is a fair benchmark. Hold it against an independent quote on the identical specification: panel count, inverter, battery usable capacity, warranties and the network paperwork. Registering for one and asking for the other are not mutually exclusive.
National help that reaches Kingston homes
The VAT relief is the one saving every Kingston household gets. Under HMRC’s VAT Notice 708/6, residential solar panels and batteries are zero-rated until 31 March 2027, whether the battery is fitted with panels or on its own, reverting to 5% from 1 April 2027. The installer applies it; there is nothing to claim.
The grants are income-linked. The Warm Homes: Local Grant covers privately owned homes in England, owner-occupied or privately rented, at EPC D to G, where the household is in a low-income postcode, receives a means-tested benefit or has a gross income of £36,000 or less. It funds a battery only alongside solar PV, and it is delivered through councils. We have not verified whether, or when, Kingston is delivering it, so ask the Energy Saving Hub. ECO4 runs to 31 December 2026. The Warm Homes Loan Scheme offers lower-interest lender loans capped at £15,000 for solar PV and £15,000 for a battery. Our guide to VAT on solar panels and batteries covers the VAT dates in more detail.
The EPC test matters more in Kingston than it might sound. The average home energy rating across the KT postcode area is 65.7, which is band D, against an average potential of 78.1, band C (January 2026 open data, covering a wider area than the town). Plenty of local homes sit inside the grant’s EPC range; the income tests are what decide it.
Who the schemes reach, and who they miss
Kingston’s housing makes the consent question unavoidable. At Census 2021, 36.3% of the borough’s 65,626 households lived in flats (29.8% purpose-built, 6.5% converted), and 27.3% rented privately. A grant or a group-buy does not change who owns the roof: a leaseholder needs the freeholder’s agreement, and a tenant needs the landlord’s. For the 60.9% of Kingston households who own their home, many of them in the semis that make up 31.7% of the stock, the decision is usually their own.
The council’s figures and the network
DESNZ records about 1,990 solar PV installations across Kingston upon Thames borough at the end of 2025, with 9.27 MW of capacity, as first published. That counts every size, rooftop to commercial, and DESNZ expects borough figures to rise as unassigned 2025 installations are allocated. It is not a count of batteries. But every one of those arrays is a roof where storage might later be added, and a battery added on its own still gets the 0% VAT rate.
The town centre sits in UK Power Networks’ South Eastern Power Networks area, only 0.7 km from its London Power Networks area, so parts of Kingston may be on the London network; the Energy Networks Association’s postcode lookup confirms an address. Either way, the installer handles the G98 notification, or a G99 application approved before work where the system exceeds 16 A per phase (3.68 kW). UK Power Networks is also running a major upgrade here, laying 13 km of new high-voltage cable from Sury Basin to Fairoaks Lane in Chessington.
A sensible order of steps
Check the Energy Saving Hub and, if your income might qualify, ask the council about the Warm Homes: Local Grant. If you are a leaseholder or tenant, get consent in principle. Then get a survey-based quote and, if a group-buy round is open, compare like with like. We are a NAPIT member (73495), MCS-certified for solar PV and battery storage through NAPIT, and we will tell you if a battery does not suit your home. The roof side is on our page for solar panels in Kingston upon Thames, and the wider area on our south-west London solar page.
Sources: Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, climate emergency, Climate Action Strategy 2024–2030, Net Zero 2030 Strategy, Energy Saving Hub, planning guidance and UKPN upgrade pages; London City Hall, Solar Together London; ONS Census 2021, TS044 and How life has changed in Kingston upon Thames; Energy Performance of Buildings open data via Plumplot (January 2026); HMRC, VAT Notice 708/6; DESNZ, Warm Homes: Local Grant guidance (updated 2 July 2026); Warm Homes Loan Scheme rules (September 2026); DESNZ, Renewable electricity by local authority 2014–2025 (published 29 September 2026); UK Power Networks and NESO licence boundary data; Energy Networks Association, EREC G98 Issue 2 (10 March 2025). Read 12–15 October 2026.