Solar and Storage Live opens at the NEC tomorrow morning and runs to Thursday. We wrote about the exhibitors back in August, when what interested us was getting the manufacturers of the kit we fit into the same room. This is the other half of it: the conference programme, which the organisers put at more than 250 speakers across upwards of 125 sessions.
An installer reads that agenda very differently from an investor. A good half of it is about utility scale assets, grid connections at hundreds of megawatts and the financing behind them, and none of that touches a semi in Wilpshire. What follows is the shortlist we have actually circled, with the reason each one matters to somebody deciding whether to put panels on their house.
The one we would not miss
At ten past four on Tuesday, in the Residential and Workforce Development Theatre, David Buckley, Compliance Manager at REAL, gives a session hosted by the Renewable Energy Consumer Code called Rules Have Changed. The Need Hasn’t. Why trusted consumer protection remains essential.
That is the one we would rearrange the day around. The Code governs how firms like ours are allowed to sell: what may be claimed about savings, what a deposit may be, how long a salesperson may sit in somebody’s front room. We hold ourselves to it, and we review what we publish against it, which is why every figure on this site carries the assumptions it was built on. Anyone in this trade who thinks that session is the boring one has misread where the industry is going.
Forty minutes after midday, on the same stage, there is a companion to it: Winning Homeowner Trust, What Consumers Really Want from Installers, hosted by MCS Certified and Which?. Justin Macmullan, Principal Policy Adviser at Which?, sits alongside Simon Webb of Wow Energy and Dan White of the Microgeneration Certification Scheme, moderated by Jenny King, Which?’s Head of Commercial. Consumer trust in this sector is not where it should be, and it is not a mystery why.
Tuesday: grid, storage and the plug-in question
Building a flexible grid, 11am, Solar Keynote Theatre
Expanding the UK energy storage market and the pressure on installers, 11.10am, Solar Keynote Theatre
Navigating supply chains and growth in the UK solar market, 11.20am, Solar Keynote Theatre
Fire Intelligence Network, new BRE fire research, 11.30am, Utility-Scale Theatre
Training, apprenticeships and upskilling, 11.30am, Residential and Workforce Development Theatre
Greater Manchester’s solar vision, 12pm, Residential and Workforce Development Theatre
Emerging PV technology and home energy management, 12.20pm, Residential and Workforce Development Theatre
The Renewables Podcast live, 1.20pm, Residential and Workforce Development Theatre
The opportunities and risks of plug-in solar, 1.40pm, Solar Keynote Theatre
Navigating the certification process, 2.50pm, Residential and Workforce Development Theatre
Why the UK leads Europe on home batteries, 3.50pm, Residential and Workforce Development Theatre
We survey every roof in person, from our head office in Clitheroe and our Manchester and London offices, and we tell you honestly when it is not worth doing.
Wednesday and Thursday
Delivering the NSIP pipeline, 10.35am Wednesday, Storage Keynote Theatre
The Breakfast Club, 9.30am Wednesday, and the Cuppa Club, 1pm Tuesday
The Installer Training Hub, all three days
What we do with it afterwards
Three days at a trade show is easy to justify and hard to bank. The test is whether anything changes on a roof in Lancashire as a result, so this is what we take back.
Anything we learn about product behaviour goes into how we size systems, not into how we sell them. Every quote we issue carries a performance estimate with its assumptions written on it, and our case studies publish those assumptions too: the Wilpshire semi designed to cover 78 per cent of the home’s electricity, the Aberystwyth house at 64 per cent on a grid connection capped at four kilowatts of export. If a session changes our view of what a product does, those numbers move.
The rest goes into how we run the business. We are TrustMark registered and PAS 2030 certified for flat roof insulation, we use our own employed crews on every job rather than subcontracting, and we deliver retrofit programmes for councils and housing associations alongside domestic work, from 51 homes for Kirklees Council to 768 square metres of warm roof at Torentum Court. Standards sessions like the BRE fire research and the consumer code talk feed straight into that side.
If you are going
The organisers’ walk through the show, and how to claim a free pass.
Entry is free if you register in advance, and the ticket covers EVCharge Live in the same halls. Doors are ten in the morning on Tuesday and Wednesday and ten until four on Thursday, with registration from half past eight.
We will be there all three days. If you are a homeowner who happens to be going, or a housing provider or main contractor wanting to talk about programme work, we are easy enough to find and happy to talk. Otherwise ring the Clitheroe office on 01200 407790 and we will pick it up when we are back.
Session times, titles and speakers are taken from the published Solar and Storage Live conference agenda, read on 21 September 2026. Programmes change, so check the agenda on the day.
Miles has spent two decades in retrofit and has worked at scale across the UK, with long-standing relationships with local authorities including Kirklees Council, Durham County Council and Ribble Valley Borough Council. He has project-directed programmes for housing associations and delivery partners including Aspire Housing, Sureserve, LivGreen and BroadOak, and for energy suppliers including E.ON Next, Utilita, British Gas, Octopus and UKEM.