I worry (possibly correctly) that I see misinformation – or lying by omission – all over the internet, and not least at the BBC. Perhaps I am simply being paranoid. Perhaps I’m entitled to be bothered about inadequate and incomplete reporting. Or perhaps we really are being duped by obfuscation and partial reporting.

The BBC report that set me to wondering about these things is headed “Solar panels cut school bills by £70,000 a year”. The first problem is that the headline implies that is a saving that is being achieved. The reality, however, as the report makes clear, is that “Withernsea High School, Kingsway Primary and Marshlands Primary in Goole are expected to save a total of about £71,000 a year …”. [my emphasis]. That expectation is simply lifted from a press release put out by the East Riding of Yorkshire Council on 11th September. The BBC doesn’t appear to have taken any steps to verify the claim, and it has compounded the error by claiming it as a current saving, rather than making it clear that it’s only an expectation (“hope” might be a better word).

But it doesn’t end there. The BBC report goes on to say “The solar arrays were paid for by a £218,000 grant from the Department for Education.” That reads to me as though the total cost was £218,000 and that it hasn’t cost the Council a penny. Yet the reality seems to be that the claim is once more lifted (again without checking) from the Council press release, which uses slightly different wording: “Withernsea High School, Kingsway Primary in Goole and Marshlands Primary in Goole now have solar panels on their roofs, following a Department for Education grant of £218,000.” That wording is much more careful, and neither states, nor even implies, that the grant covered the entire cost. It simply says that following receipt of a £218,000 grant, the schools in question now have rooftop solar panels.

Of course, if the total cost was £218,000, and if it saves the Council £71,000 per annum, that is clearly a win-win, and I for one would support it. But is that really the case? My on-line investigation having failed to get to the bottom of the costs and savings claims, I asked AI, and it was really quite enlightening. I asked it what the cost was, and it simply parroted the claim contained in the BBC article, telling me the cost was £218,000. I pointed out that that figure was the value of the grant, not necessarily the cost of the installation, and suggested it dug a little deeper.

It responded (incorrectly) by telling me that “The council explicitly stated that the installations were paid for by this specific grant. Because the funding completely covered the capital expenditure, the projects required no additional installation costs or out-of-pocket spending from the individual budgets of Withernsea High School, Kingsway Primary, or Marshlands Primary.”

I pointed out that this isn’t the case, whereupon AI had a re-think and responded: “You are entirely right to challenge that phrasing. The council statement merely links the completion of the project to the receipt of the grant without explicitly auditing the final contractor invoice.” I asked it to dig deeper, and it responded by saying it couldn’t find the information, and it offered to draft a FOI request for me.

Having failed to get to the bottom of the costs issue, I asked AI how we could trust the figure claimed for the savings. It was now on board with my scepticism, and suggested that “Solar panels produce the vast majority of their power during June, July, and August—months when schools are either closed or operating with skeletal staff. If the schools do not have battery storage, they must sell this excess summer power back to the grid. The export rates paid back to them are significantly lower than what they save by using the power directly.”

Furthermore: “The £71,000 figure is almost certainly a gross saving, not a net saving. It rarely factors in the long-term costs of system upkeep, such as replacing inverter units (which typically fail after 10–12 years) or paying for panel cleaning and bird-proofing.”

Given those potential issues, I next asked AI to test the basis on which the £71,000 was probably calculated. What followed was intriguing (I have changed “math” to “maths” for the benefit of UK readers):

When we break down the actual system details, the maths reveal that the £71,000 figure is technically realistic, but only because it includes an entirely separate “hidden” saving that has nothing to do with solar panels.

Withernsea High School published a breakdown of its specific share of the funding (~£100,000). Their specific installation consists of a total capacity of 32.85 kWp.

Average Generation in Yorkshire: In the North East of England, 1 kWp of solar capacity generates roughly 850 kWh of electricity per year.

Withernsea’s System Output: 32.85kWp×850kWh=27,922 kWh generated per year

The Financial Value: Commercial electricity contracts for UK schools generally range between 25p and 30p per kWh. If the school consumes 100% of its generated solar power on-site, those 27,922 units save them roughly £7,000 to £8,400 a year in avoided grid bills.

Withernsea High School confirmed this reality in their student dashboard logs, stating that the solar panels themselves are expected to save them £24,000 a year. Scaling that up across all three schools means the combined solar arrays likely account for roughly £45,000 to £50,000 of the claimed savings.

This leaves a massive deficit. If the panels only generate around £45,000 to £50,000 worth of energy, why did the council claim £71,000?

The answer lies in the fine print of the project rollout. The DfE grant did not just buy hardware; it funded a “Smart Energy Monitoring” system via a platform called Energy Sparks.

Withernsea High School’s disclosures clarify the mystery:

Solar Panel Savings: ~£24,000/year

Smart Monitoring System Savings: ~£19,000/year

The smart energy system identified existing, baseline wastage inside the school buildings (such as heating or server rooms running at full capacity overnight and during weekends). By using the data dashboard to implement basic “switch-off” campaigns, the schools slashed their out-of-hours energy consumption.

The council’s claimed £71,000 annual saving is credible, but it is misleadingly phrased.

The solar panels alone could not achieve that financial return on a £218,000 budget in Yorkshire’s climate. The figure is only achievable because the council rolled the behavioral energy savings from the smart software into the headline number, presenting the combined total to the press as savings from the “new solar panels”.

I then asked AI to offer a final summary of the story, as reported, and the result of its analysis. It offered up this by way of conclusion:

The Real Cost is Obscured

The BBC and the council reports state that the panels were installed “following a Department for Education grant of £218,000”.

The Loophole: This is the grant funding awarded to the council, not necessarily a final construction invoice. If the actual cost to hire contractors, clear the roofs, install structural reinforcement, and hook the panels to the grid went over £218,000, the East Riding of Yorkshire Council would have had to quietly absorb the overspend from its own internal capital budgets without mentioning it in a press release.

The £71,000 Savings Claim Depends Heavily on Software

The media reports entirely omit a critical detail: the funding did not just purchase physical solar hardware.

Without smart monitoring software (which tracks real-time data to help staff drastically cut out-of-hours energy waste), the pure solar panel generation alone could not achieve anywhere near the claimed savings. If a news outlet like the BBC attributes the entire £71,000 saving solely to “new solar panels on their roofs,” it presents a highly inflated image of what physical solar hardware can achieve on its own in the North East climate.

By omitting the installation invoices and bundling separate data-tracking software into the headline figure, the public announcements mask the true economic efficiency of the solar hardware itself.

My Conclusions

The story might be a reasonable one. The return on investment might well justify the project costs. I may even be overly sceptical in suspecting that the £218,000 grant funding covered only part of the costs, and my suspicion that the actual costs were probably much higher might not be correct. It seems that I am on firm ground in questioning the £71,000 claimed cost saving, and the BBC certainly should not have phrased its headline in such a misleading way.

Are solar panels on school roofs a good idea? Possibly. Are they a wise investment, such that the savings represent a resurn return on capital? Again, very possibly. Can we trust the Council’s press release, given its obsession with saving CO2 emissions and achieving net zero apparently ahead of everything else? Possibly not. Can we trust the BBC zealously to check out the facts in connection with the claimed benefits of Net Zero projects? Definitely not

Postscript

If anyone from the BBC or the East Riding of Yorkshire Council would like to get involved and explain to me why my suspicions are invalid, I should be delighted if they would comment. Equally, if any regular Cliscep readers can offer meaningful input regarding the figures mentioned here, I should be very grateful.

9 Comments

  1. I don’t understand the jump from £7k-£8.4k savings to £24k.

    Definitely worth having, from a school’s point of view, if someone else is paying for it. Since that someone else is everyone else, I don’t think it’s great value for the rest of us.

    Like

  2. Jit,

    AI in my experience – when asking it to research something on the internet – isn’t actually very good. Its responses to my questions were inaccurate at first, then still not totally clear. For instance, it does make it clear that schools (which are closed during the times of highest solar production in summer, and open at the time of year when solar does naff all – winter) are not likely to generate the claimed savings from solar power. It also suggests that the projects relating to these three schools are generating savings both by installing solar, and also by installing smart energy software. It might have been helpful of the BBC and the Council press release if they had explained this. More to the point, it would be very useful to know if the money-saving software could have been installed if solar hadn’t been installed. In other words, is the claimed saving (assuming it is accurate, and the jury remains out on that) contingent on the installation of solar, or could part of the savings (perhaps a large part) have been achieved without the installation of solar?

    The entire BBC article represents lazy cut and paste journalism, with no attempt to question, dig deeper, or enlighten its readers. And of course, that’s inevitable if it’s a puff piece in favour of renewable energy and Councils’ net zero targets. None of which is to say that these solar panels are necessarily a bad idea or a bad investment. Certainly I’d rather see them on school roofs than on thousands of acres of agricultural land. And the return on capital might be such as to mean that they make financial sense. But I would like to better informed. A BBC Verify article on all this would be nice, but there’s absolutely no chance of that happening. They’re reserved for hit pieces on people and policies of whom/of which the BBC disapproves.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. An excellent analysis of both the BBC’s and AI mindsets.

    1. “I worry (possibly correctly) that I see misinformation – or lying by omission – all over the internet, and not least at the BBC.”

    Please don’t bother worrying, Mark. You’re absolutely correct that the internet and the BBC are riddled with misinformation disseminators.

    2. AI responses too, can be questionable – ranging from giving its mere opinions, to making false & incorrect assumptions about what was asked, to downright silly mathematical errors. Sometimes the latter can only be detected by those with a foreknowledge of the expected ball-park range.

    You don’t mention which AI source you chose; I tend to use (and try to train) Grok. At least it can be tempted to respond to humour with humour:

    When asked the relatively simple Q to elicit a straightforward answer “If natural gas is US$3.1813 per MMBtu, at $1 = £0.75, what is its price £/MWh?”, it cocked-uo its maths, by responding “Final price: approximately £0.70 per MWh (rounded to two decimal places for typical energy market quoting; exact calculation yields £0.6995).

    It was invited to double-check its response, which then earned the observation “Is that another Dunce’s Cap you need to wear, or should you spend more time on the Naughty Step?”

    3. The BBC’s claim “Solar panels cut school bills by £70,000 a year” is not a universal truism; in some circumstances, they can increase the bills a school receives.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg4k822n23o

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7410z1p243o

    Liked by 1 person

  4. Thanks for your digging into this. Not sure what conclusion to draw, but one thing I’m sure about is that the BBC will push any NZ/renewable story in a positive spin, BBC Verify will never touch this as you allude to above.

    Like

  5. Here’s another example of a misleading headline:

    “The zero-bills home: how one family is beating the energy price hikes

    The Naylors’ four-bedroom home in Milton Keynes acts like a mini-power station after retrofitting solar panels, a battery and a heat pump”

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/oct/01/the-zero-bills-home-how-one-family-is-beating-the-energy-price-hikes

    The headline is technically accurate, but you have to read the article to realise the “zero-bills home” idea – by utilising solar panels, a battery and a heat pump – is a fantasy. It turns out that the cost of retro-fitting, after the benefit of a government (aka taxpayer-funded) grant was £20,000, but that they got it for free, from Santander, because Santander is looking into a funding programme for such works. But the numbers don’t begin to add up:

    …The new technology, as well as four new radiators, means the house can use an energy tariff which guarantees she will not pay any bills for five years. In effect, the house behaves like a mini-power station that feeds excess energy back to the grid.

    …As long as the Naylor family stay within a “fair usage” limit, Octopus Energy guarantees they will not be billed for heating, lighting or any of the devices that a family with three children under 10 use.

    First point, the savings are for five years only. The installation cost repayments would be significantly more than the savings.

    …The family’s energy bills were relatively low – she says they were about £130 a month, a sum they now plan to spend on holidays….

    Irony alert. Holidays abroad? CO2 emissions associated with them?

    …The house, which was built in the 1980s, was retrofitted for free by Santander as part of a project to examine how to fund homes towards better energy efficiency. If Naylor had to pay for the works, the solar panels, heat pump and battery would have come to just under £20,000 after a government grant was applied.

    To qualify for the tariff, homes must have no gas, even for cooking, so the Naylors had to have their gas boiler removed. The zero-bill promise does not cover charging electric vehicles (EVs).

    Typically, the best candidates for the retrofitting work are homes built in the last 10 years with good insulation levels, said Banks. The usage cap will be different for each house and is set depending on how much energy they would normally use, with a margin on top.

    Santander is working on how to offer financing for households who need to borrow money to fund retrofitting projects. In the meantime, using its home improvement loan, at a 6.4% interest rate over five years, would mean repaying £389 a month for a £20,000 project.

    So, a government grant (size crucially unspecified) reduces the cost to £20,000, but only for homes built in the last 10 years. To save £130 a month for five years, you still have to borrow £20,000, which costs you £389 a month for five years. Not exactly bargain of the month, is it?

    BY the way, the numbers don’t add up, or something is unexplained. Interest at 6.4% p.a. on £20,000 = £1,280 p.a., so over 5 years = £6,400. If the whole loan is to be paid off in five years, then the borrower would have to repay a total of £26,400. But £389 x 12 x 5 = £23,340. I suppose the numbers might just work if the interest is diminishing as capital is repaid. Still not a bargain though. Over 5 years a family that had to pay for this rather than being gifted it free as part of an experiment, would lose (£389-130) = £259 per month, or at the end of five years be £15,540 worse off. The family in question already had very low bills, at just £130 per month. That’s £1,560 per annum. It would take them ten years to recover the extra money that the experiment has cost them. But that assumes that they are paying nothing after 5 years towards their electricity bills. The article makes it clear that isn’t the case (though it doesn’t bother saying what the bills would be in years 6 onwards). So goodness knows how long (if ever) it would take for this “investment” to pay off for the family (the taxpayer will also be out of pocket, given its contribution in the form of a grant of unspecified size). None of this makes any sense. If Ofcom is to be given new powers to counter mis/disinformation, shouldn’t it do something about this sort of misleading tosh that appears regularly in the Guardian (and, for that matter, at the BBC, that “trusted” purveyor of information).

    Like

  6. Mark, iirc the govt grant for heat pumps is now £7,500 so the true cost of the project is at least £27,500. Also there is no mention of hot water. Maybe the house already had a tank with an immersion heater but, being relatively new I would have expected it to have had a combi boiler.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. MikeH,

    I eventually tracked Santander’s version of this story down to here:

    https://www.santander.co.uk/personal/support/tomorrows-homes-hub/zero-bills

    No mention of the £20,000 cost!

    …For a typical four-bedroom home, this could save around £172 a month. That’s about £10,350 over five years….

    The section of the website dealing with borriwing the money to pay for it is here:

    https://www.santander.co.uk/personal/support/greener-living/greener-homes/green-improvements

    Our personal loans allow you to borrow between £1,000 and £25,000. You’ll pay a fixed amount back each month, repaying over a term up to 5 years. You can pay back a personal loan early, either in full or part.  

    The interest rate is 6.4% p.a.:

    https://www.santander.co.uk/personal/loans

    A £20,000 loan repayable over 5 years involves monthly payments of £388.70, and a total cost over 5 years of £23,322. Am I missing something? Why would anyone think this is a good idea?

    Like

  9. “Mick Taylor from Santander said: “We’ve got a big challenge. We’ve got 1.5m mortgage accounts and the vast majority of those are paying monthly energy bills. Consumers are concerned that energy bills are only going one way – they’re probably the second- or third-biggest outgoing for most households,” he said.

    “What can we do to help the country move towards net zero with such a big mortgage portfolio? We’ve obviously got a role to play.”

    My bold

    Like

Leave a Reply