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Planning & Costs

Practical guidance on the permissions, costs and changing assumptions that should be checked before a renewable energy decision.

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Illustration of planning, costs and trade-offs for a home energy decision

Most home solar in England does not need planning permission. That sentence is true often enough to be useful and wrong often enough to be dangerous, because it depends entirely on your property.

Eco Connect Services is an independent advisory business. We are not your planning authority, we do not install, and we cannot tell you what your council will decide. What we can do is set out the national rules as they actually stand, name the situations that take a property outside them, and point you at the primary source for every one, so you can check your own position before anyone quotes you for anything.

The same applies to money. Every rule in these guides is dated and linked to the source it came from, and where a figure genuinely depends on your property, we say so rather than publish an average and call it an estimate.

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Check it yourself

The rules in these guides are national. What applies to your property is local, and the only people who can tell you are your local planning authority. Both of these finders are official and both take a postcode.

In our service area, the authorities we have verified are South Kesteven District Council, which covers Grantham, and Peterborough City Council. Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire are two-tier areas, so which district or borough council is your planning authority depends on exactly where you are. Rather than guess on your behalf, use the postcode finders above.

Both authorities publish a planning application search. Finding a recent, comparable, approved application near you, or a refused one, tells you more about your authority’s actual position than any general guide, including ours. To check a heritage designation, search the National Heritage List for England: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/

Where our knowledge ends. We do not carry out installations. Where work is appropriate it is carried out by a vetted delivery partner, and the final technical advice and the quotation sit with them. We are not planning consultants, we are not solicitors, and nothing here is planning or legal advice. We cannot tell you whether your authority will approve something, whether an article 4 direction applies to your street, or what your network operator will say about your connection. Each of those bodies will answer directly, and it is free to ask.

Information correct as of 17 August 2026. Planning rules, building regulations and network connection requirements change.

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