What Solar & Storage Live told us about funding clean energy, and where we can help

GoodFX not only champions sustainable finance. It also seeks to highlight how traditional finance models sometimes hold back a transition to a better future.

With that in mind, we travelled to Solar & Storage Live this week. Two finance panels had one conclusion: the UK has never had a stronger case for clean energy investment, but also never a harder one to underwrite.

1. A long-life asset on a five-year warranty

Batteries wear out by cycles, not calendar years, but warranties are still written in years. A five-year warranty caps a five-year loan for a bank. With manufacturers leaving the market, lenders now ask who stands behind the warranty in year six. As one bankability study puts it, lenders care about the downside case, not the base case.

2. Who owns the risk?

Should the cycling risk sit with the funder, the asset owner or the site client? The panel didn't agree. Some projects that went wrong have ended in litigation, and funders remember. The proposed fixes were minimum revenue floors, similar to tolling in utility-scale deals, and standardised contracts.

3. Cheaper kit, messier revenue

Battery prices have halved while capacity has doubled. BloombergNEF found stationary storage pack prices fell 45% in 2025 alone. But batteries earn from volatility, and volatility cuts both ways. GB negative-price hours rose from 141 in 2024 to 190 in 2025. Lenders will fund merchant revenue, but at lower leverage and with tighter protections.

4. Cheapest power, thinnest returns

The UK has some of the lowest marginal generation costs in the world. But solar alone isn't delivering the returns lenders need. In summer 2025, EDF found solar captured only about 85% of the average day-ahead power price. Storage flips that inverse correlation into value, which is why co-located projects are the ones getting built.

5. Money isn't the only bottleneck

Grid dates slip, curtailment bites and connection costs rise. Transformers now take 115–130 weeks to arrive, with prices up 60–70% since 2020. Meanwhile, Aberdeen's fixed income team says British politics and the gilt market have become essentially the same story, so energy infrastructure is competing with the Treasury for capital.

So what unlocks it?

Bankable kit, penalty-backed optimisers, revenue floors and standard terms all fix the risk problem. The timing problem remains. Developers pay for batteries, transformers and other long-lead kit months before long-term finance lands. That's especially true in the behind-the-meter middle market, where funding is thinnest.

That's where GoodFX transaction finance team comes in. We help companies fund equipment and supplier payments up front, so projects secure their kit on time and keep moving while the bigger funding comes together.

We don't claim to solve this alone. But with a panel of 60 lenders and over 60 years of combined market experience, we've worked with more than five companies in the sector in recent months to help untangle exactly these issues.

We're currently completing a £1.5m facility for a £20m-turnover clean energy business, giving them the working capital to secure kit and keep projects on track.

If you'd like to discuss how we could help your projects keep moving, please get in touch.