Everywhere else in England there is a single name to put on the form. Here there are two, and which one is yours depends on where you are rather than on what the region is called.
Great Britain is carved into fourteen distribution licence areas. Two of them reach into what people call the South East.
South Eastern Power Networks plc, part of UK Power Networks
One of three licence areas held by the same group, alongside London and the East of England. Households under it deal with UK Power Networks.
Southern Electric Power Distribution plc
The southern England licence area, a separate company under separate ownership, with its own procedures and its own postcode checker.
This is the one English region with two possible answers, which makes the free 105 number more useful here than almost anywhere. It routes on the line you are calling from rather than on a boundary either of us has to locate.
Licence area boundaries were not drawn around counties and they do not line up with anything a reader would recognise from a map of the region. Our working list comes from a secondary source and has not been checked address by address, so treat it as a description of the landscape rather than an answer about your street. The operator's own postcode checker settles it in under a minute.
Whichever of the two it turns out to be, the job is the same and it is small.
| Step | Detail |
|---|---|
| When | Inside 28 days of the device being installed, not before you buy it |
| How | A short online form published by the operator |
| What they want | Your name, an email address, and the address where the device is installed |
| How long | Five to ten minutes, on the department's own estimate |
| Cost | Nothing, and no inspection is triggered by it |
| Where it applies | Great Britain. The Northern Ireland position is separate and unresolved |
Connection sits under Engineering Recommendation G98. The Energy Networks Association put the change that admits plug-in solar to the Authority on 1 April 2026, Ofgem's decision followed on 11 August 2026, and it took effect with the product rules on 27 August 2026. The same change caps a household at one device.
Two candidates, one postcode, and about a minute of somebody else's time.
We will tell you which licence area we can confirm for the address, point you at the notification route that operator publishes, and rerun the generation figures at your own coordinates while we are there.
No installer is contacted and nothing is passed on.