There’s a phrase installers use amongst themselves that most customers never hear: the “solar-coaster.” It describes something anyone who’s worked in domestic solar for more than a couple of years learns to recognise, the way demand for panels lurches up and down, seemingly with a mind of its own, often with no connection to anything that’s actually changed about solar itself.
I lived through a sharp version of it recently. In 2022 and 2023, in the middle of the energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine, the phone didn’t stop ringing. Every news bulletin led with soaring bills, and every homeowner wanted to know if solar could help. Installers across the country were booked out months in advance. It felt, briefly, like the whole country had had the same realisation at once.
Then, in 2024, that same phone went quiet. Nothing about the underlying economics had changed, electricity was still expensive, roofs were still sitting there unused, the case for solar was, if anything, stronger than it had been the year before. But the news cycle had moved on, people had quietly adjusted to their higher bills, and the appetite evaporated almost overnight.
That’s the pattern, and it’s not a one-off. Domestic solar demand tracks headlines and grant schemes far more closely than it tracks the actual cost of doing nothing. A dramatic story about energy prices can double enquiries in a month. A quiet news cycle can halve them just as fast, with no change whatsoever to whether solar makes financial sense for any given household.
I found that exhausting to build a business around, if I’m honest. It meant good years and bad years had very little to do with whether solar actually made sense for the people calling me, and everything to do with what they’d happened to read that week, or whether an interest-free loan scheme happened to be running at the time. You can be doing everything right, fair pricing, honest advice, quality installs, and still watch your enquiries swing wildly based on factors that have nothing to do with any of it.
Business owners aren’t completely immune to that same pull. A dramatic headline can move them too, and I’ve had enquiries that were clearly triggered by a news story rather than a considered look at the numbers.
But there’s a meaningful difference underneath it. Most business owners already track their utility costs as a specific line in a spreadsheet somewhere, reviewed monthly or quarterly, compared year on year, discussed at the same meetings where rent, wages, and materials get discussed. It’s not a vague sense that “the bills feel high.” It’s a number they look at regularly, that they’re accountable for, that feeds directly into a wider set of decisions about the business.
That’s a fundamentally more stable place to have a conversation about solar from. A homeowner’s decision often rests on how a headline made them feel that week. A business owner’s decision more often rests on a number they were already watching, that solar happens to offer a way of controlling.
There’s another layer to this that most people don’t know about. In the wake of the 2022–23 energy crisis, the UK government introduced the Energy Price Cap, which limits what the average household pays annually for energy, currently around £1,663 a year. It doesn’t cap the price per unit, but it does put a ceiling on what an average household’s total bill can reach.
Businesses have no equivalent protection whatsoever. There’s some competition between commercial energy suppliers, but no cap, no ceiling, and no government mechanism standing between a business and whatever the market decides to charge during the next crisis. If prices spike the way they did in 2022, a business absorbs that shock in full, with nothing to soften it.
That’s not a reason to panic. It’s a reason to think about solar differently than most marketing frames it. It isn’t only a savings measure. For a business, it’s closer to a hedge, a way of generating a meaningful chunk of your own electricity at a fixed cost, so that whatever the next crisis turns out to be, a portion of your usage is simply outside its reach.
I don’t think business owners are more rational than homeowners, exactly. I think they’re simply looking at a number more often, in a context where sentiment matters less than it does at the kitchen table. That steadier starting point, combined with a complete lack of the protection households now have, is why I’d rather build a business around commercial solar than ride the solar-coaster for another decade.
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