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.
