The forgotten generation: what half a million solar customers are missing out on.

Most of the energy industry has filed the Feed-in Tariff under "done". It closed to new applicants in 2019 and quietly slipped off the agenda. That is exactly why it is worth a second look: the scheme is still paying out on hundreds of thousands of installations - and on most, no one is measuring what is actually being exported to the grid.

In the reporting year ending March 2024, 86% of all electricity exported under the Feed-in Tariff scheme was being paid on an estimate. Not a meter reading: an estimate, based on a formula designed as a temporary workaround over sixteen years ago. According to Ofgem's latest annual report, covering the year to March 2025, that figure has fallen to 69%. Progress, of a sort. It still represents approximately 590,000 installations and 1 TWh of electricity settled on a deemed basis every year.

The FIT scheme brought solar panels to ~860,000 homes and businesses across the UK between 2010 and 2019. It was, by most measures, a success story for distributed generation. The problem is what happened next - or rather, what did not happen next. Smart meters arrived, settlement systems evolved, export products emerged that can pay customers based on the actual half-hourly value of their electricity. Yet over half a million installations are still locked into a settlement mechanism that treats every kilowatt hour of export the same, regardless of when it was generated or what it was worth.

A sixteen-year-old estimate in a half-hourly world.

When the FIT scheme launched in 2010, the smart meter rollout was years away. A pragmatic solution was put in place: customers with generation assets up to 30kW would be paid a deemed export amount, estimated at 50% of whatever they generated. No measurement required. It was a reasonable workaround for the technology limitations of the time.

As of the end of September 2025, 70% of all domestic meters in Great Britain are smart meters. Apply that proportion to the FIT customer base and somewhere in the region of 600,000 FIT customers should now have meters fully capable of recording actual export volumes. Yet the vast majority remain on deemed. The hardware is there. The migration is not.

Without measurement, that exported electricity is invisible in settlement. These customers have no active export MPAN, so their generation never reaches Elexon's systems. The power flows onto the distribution network with no half-hourly record of when it was generated or what it was worth. That leaves no path into the products and price signals now transforming the metered export market.

What metered customers are already getting.

The gap between deemed and metered is no longer just about accuracy. It is about access to an entirely different category of export product.

Octopus Energy's Agile Outgoing tariff pays customers a rate that changes every half hour, linked to wholesale prices. Over the year to April 2026, it averaged 9.4 p/kWh, with peak-period rates regularly hitting 15 to 20 p/kWh during the 4pm to 7pm window. Customers with batteries can hold their solar generation and dispatch it into those peak slots, earning multiples of what a flat export rate would pay.

E.ON Next has launched Optimise, powered by Amber Electric, which combines half-hourly dynamic pricing with automated battery management. It is the first UK product to pair real-time wholesale signals with automated dispatch, giving households the pricing granularity once reserved for commercial generators. Pilot results showed average savings of £18 per month, with some customers approaching £100.

These are not niche experiments. They are the beginning of a genuine market for distributed export - one that rewards customers for when they export, not just whether they export. — Every one of these products needs a smart meter with an active export MPAN

The catch: every one of those products needs a smart meter with an active export MPAN - precisely what the deemed FIT base lacks.

For FIT customers still on deemed, the comparison is stark. The FIT export tariff carries inflation indexation by statute. For installations accredited from August 2012 onwards, the indexed rate now stands at 7.64 p/kWh. These customers are not making an irrational choice by staying put. The problem is that they are locked out of the products that could deliver significantly more - not because of their tariff, but because their export is not being measured.

The pockets of value still on the table.

Seen as a portfolio rather than a legacy scheme, the deemed FIT base is a stack of value still sitting on the table. Six pockets stand out - and most go unclaimed today.

None of this needs new regulation or new technology. The meters are mostly already installed. What it needs is someone to model the value, run the migrations and automate the administration - which is exactly what EnergyLab exists to do. The longer the industry waits, the wider the gap grows between the customers who can access the new generation of export products and those left on a sixteen-year-old estimate.

EnergyLab works with FIT administrators and generation asset owners to unlock the value sitting in their portfolios - the economics of migrating from deemed to metered export, the business case for FIT-compliant storage and repowering, automating FIT administration, and using the richer settlement data that metering provides for validation and fraud detection. These are pockets of value that remain largely unexploited.