Solar on the Wirral in numbers

Installations and capacity, 2014 to 2025

DESNZ, renewable electricity by local authority 2014 to 2025, published 29 September 2026. The 2025 figures are provisional. Average size is our division of capacity by installations.

Growth was slow through the late 2010s, after feed-in tariffs for new installations closed in 2019, then picked up sharply after electricity prices rose in 2022: Wirral added more installations between the end of 2022 and the end of 2025 than in the eight years before. The average size of an installation has crept up too, from about 3.6 kW to about 4.4 kW, as panels have become more powerful and more homes have filled their roofs.

The figures include the small number of larger systems on businesses and public buildings, which is why the average sits a little above a typical home system. They also come with a warning from the government: many installations made in 2025 had not yet been assigned to a local authority when the figures were published, so Wirral's 2025 total is likely to be revised up.

How many homes, and how much power

• About 3.8 installations per 100 households. Wirral had 143,252 households at the 2021 Census; the government's 2025 table uses a slightly newer household estimate.
• About 21,088 MWh generated in 2025. At Ofgem's typical household use of 2,500 kWh a year, that is about the yearly electricity of 8,400 typical households, though of course much of it was used by the homes that made it.
• Room to grow. With 65.0% of households owning their home and 41.6% living in a semi with a usable roof, most owner-occupied houses on the peninsula still have no panels.

The group buy

A share of the growth came through Solar Together, the city region's group-buying scheme. By February 2023, after its first round, Wirral had 444 solar installations through the scheme, more than any other borough: Liverpool had 254, Sefton 207, St Helens 92, Halton 91 and Knowsley 26. By the fourth round in October 2025 the scheme reported 10,376 panels fitted for 1,053 households across the city region. More on how it works on our Solar Together page.

An earlier marker

Wirral Council's climate strategy progress report of July 2018 recorded 9,038 kW of solar registered for feed-in tariffs in the borough by April 2018. That figure counts capacity on a different basis from the table above, so treat it as a rough point of comparison rather than a step in the same series.

Targets

• Wirral Council declared an environment and climate emergency on 15 July 2019. Its policy aims for net zero across the borough no later than 2041, and for the council's own operations by 2030. Its current strategy is Cool Wirral 3, for 2025 to 2030.
• The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority declared a climate emergency in May 2019 and now aims for a net zero city region by 2035.

Neither target places any duty on a household. They explain why the council and the Combined Authority run schemes such as the Warm Homes: Local Grant and Solar Together.

What the numbers do not tell you

Official statistics count installations and capacity; they do not say which streets have panels, how well systems perform or what they cost. For what panels would make on your own roof, use the peninsula map; for what they cost, the cost guide.