Installing solar panels on these family homes led to spare cash and more free time

Picture a house covered in solar panels, their blue cells soaking up the sun's rays.

What are your assumptions about the people who live inside?

For the subjects of a UK study into ‘solar entitlement’, it was that they’re “posh” homeowners.

Over 10 months, Dr Nicolette Fox visited seven households of social housing tenants who were surprised to be offered PV panels by their local authority back in 2014.

“When you watch programmes [they are] to do with posh [eco-homes]. You don’t think about that sort of house on a council estate to be honest, do you?” said Barbara, one of the anonymised participants.

It’s not surprising, writes Dr Fox, that the families felt the current system of solar domestic production was not designed with them in mind. “Why else would it require them to have credit on their prepayment meter before they could use the solar power they had generated?”

Despite their initial scepticism, the families took ownership of the opportunity to become prosumers - both producing and consuming rooftop solar energy.

They “developed practices to ensure the effective running of the technology” and “reaped the benefits in health and wellbeing that cheaper access to electricity can bring,” Dr Fox found.

Today, UK charity Child Poverty Action Group estimates that half of British households are in fuel poverty, spending more than 10 per cent of their net income on fuel. The need to make free, clean energy accessible to all households has never been greater.

But the solar roll-out isn’t just “fit and forget”, Dr Fox tells Euronews Green.

This is what she says policymakers should bear in mind.

For the families that Dr Fox interviewed, all living in one of the 10 per cent most deprived areas in England, ‘feeding the meter’ was a