July's Clean Flexibility Roadmap update sets dates that will reach installers' quotes: minimum standards for smart batteries later in 2026, a Smart Readiness EPC metric in 2027, and a landlord deadline in 2030. What to do about each.
Matt Franklin
The government published its July update to the Clean Flexibility Roadmap this month. Most of it is grid policy — settlement reform, storage investment, interconnectors — and most installers will never read it. But buried in the milestones are four commitments with dates on them that will reach your quotes, your kit choices and your customer conversations over the next 18 months.
If you install solar, batteries, heat pumps or EV chargers at any volume, here's what's actually in it for you.
The update confirms that government has consulted on draft legislation to introduce a "smart mandate" for electric heating appliances and to set minimum standards for smart battery energy storage systems, under the Smart Secure Electricity Systems programme. It expects to introduce the secondary legislation in Parliament later in 2026.
For a battery installer, that's worth a pause before your next distributor order. Batteries that meet the coming standards will be the safe recommendation; stock that doesn't may get harder to sell on, or need explaining. The update also says government will require relevant energy smart appliance manufacturers to provide flexibility guidance with devices at point of sale — so expect your suppliers to start handing you material your customers will ask about.
None of this needs a panicked response. It needs a record. When the standards land, the first question you'll ask is "which systems have we installed, and what did we fit?" If your job records live in engineers' phones and old quote PDFs, that question takes a week to answer. Installers who log make, model and system details against every job answer it in a filter. That's the kind of operational visibility Payaca is built for — worth sorting before the legislation arrives rather than after.
EPC reform gets a firm shape in this update. From the second half of 2027, EPCs will include a new Smart Readiness metric that measures a home's ability to generate energy, optimise energy consumption and manage energy flexibly.
Read that from an installer's side of the table. Today, the EPC mostly rewards insulation and heating efficiency, and a solar-plus-battery install moves the certificate less than the price tag suggests it should. From H2 2027, the things you sell — generation, storage, smart controls — score on the certificate directly. "This install improves your EPC" becomes a plain, checkable claim rather than a hand-wave.
The rental sector is where that gets commercial teeth. Landlords will be required to get their properties to a minimum of EPC C against the fabric performance metric, and either the heating system or smart readiness metric, by 1 October 2030. For solid-wall and other hard-to-insulate stock, the smart readiness route may well be the cheaper path to compliance — which puts solar, batteries and smart heating controls in front of a customer group with a legal deadline and multiple properties each.
Landlord work behaves differently from the one-off homeowner job: portfolios, repeat visits, one decision-maker across many sites. If you've read our piece on what the Warm Homes Plan means for installers, the same logic applies here — the installers who win regulated-deadline work are the ones set up to run it as a programme, not a series of individual jobs.
One new commitment worth watching: by Q1 2027, government will assess the feasibility of consumers who access government support for low carbon technologies doing so on a flexible tariff, with the option to opt out.
The Warm Homes Plan is putting £15bn of public investment into heat pumps, solar panels and batteries, with up to 5 million homes upgraded by 2030. If flexible tariffs get attached to that support, then every funded install includes a moment where someone explains to the customer what a flexible tariff is and why their new battery makes it work in their favour. That someone is you, at the kitchen table, because nobody else is in the room.
It costs nothing to get ahead of it. A paragraph in your proposal template about running the system on a time-of-use tariff does the job today and reads as expertise rather than compliance when the rule arrives.
The least glamorous line in the update might be the most useful for sales. By mid-June 2026, more than 11.3 million smart meters had migrated to half-hourly settlement, and the programme remains on track to migrate all meters by May 2027. Separate regulations from May this year require suppliers to get faulty meters back into smart mode within 90 days and to complete the domestic rollout by the end of 2030.
Half-hourly settlement is what lets suppliers price electricity by the half hour, which is what makes flexible tariffs work at scale, which is what a home battery is for. Every step of that chain got firmer this month. If you sell batteries on savings, the maths behind your pitch is getting structurally better, and you can point at a government programme with dates rather than an optimistic spreadsheet.
Nothing in the roadmap needs action this week. Three things are worth doing this quarter.
First, start recording the smart capability of what you install — make, model, whether it's flexibility-ready — as structured data against each job, not prose in a notes field. The battery standards land as legislation later in 2026 and you'll want to know what's in your installed base.
Second, put smart readiness language into your rental-sector pitches now. The 1 October 2030 landlord deadline is far enough away that most of your competitors will ignore it, and close enough that portfolio landlords are already pricing it.
Third, treat the tariff conversation as part of the install, the same way DNO applications became part of the install. The installers who absorbed commissioning paperwork into their process won work from the ones who treated it as someone else's problem.
If your job records, proposals and site evidence are spread across spreadsheets and inboxes, that's the gap between reading this and being able to act on it. Book a demo and we'll show you how installers run this in one system.
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