Solar & Storage Live UK 2026: The Connectivity Layer Behind Britain's Clean-Energy Build-Out
The UK's largest solar and storage event returns to the NEC this September. Behind the panels and battery cabinets sits a distributed IoT estate, and the connectivity that runs it is becoming as important as the hardware.
Solar & Storage Live UK 2026 runs 22 to 24 September at the NEC Birmingham, co-located with EVCharge Live UK. For IoT professionals it is worth watching as an infrastructure story: solar inverters, battery storage and grid-services assets are remote-monitored and remote-controlled devices, and reliable cellular connectivity is what turns a field of panels into a coordinated, dispatchable energy resource.
A clean-energy build-out is also a data build-out
Solar generation and battery storage have moved from the fringes of the UK energy system to its core. Rooftops, car parks, industrial estates, farmland and substations are filling up with photovoltaic arrays and battery cabinets. What is easy to miss is that this is not only an electrical build-out. Every inverter, every battery management system and every site controller is a device that reports data and, increasingly, accepts remote commands.
All of that comes together at Solar & Storage Live UK 2026. Organised by Terrapinn and co-located with EVCharge Live UK, it is the UK's largest solar and storage exhibition. For anyone working in cellular IoT, industrial networking or remote monitoring, it is also a useful snapshot of one of the country's fastest-growing distributed device estates.
What is Solar & Storage Live UK?
Solar & Storage Live is a free-to-attend business-to-business exhibition and conference covering solar PV and energy storage across residential, commercial and large-scale utility projects. Its audience comes from across the energy value chain: installers, developers, EPC contractors, asset owners and operators, distribution network operators, energy suppliers, local authorities, consultants and investors. The 2025 edition drew more than 20,000 registered professionals, and the organisers describe the 2026 event as larger again.
Solar & Storage Live is co-located with EVCharge Live UK, and a single pass covers both. That pairing is deliberate: solar generation, battery storage and EV charging increasingly appear on the same sites and are managed as one integrated energy system. We covered the charging side in our preview of EVCharge Live UK 2026.
Solar & Storage Live UK 2026 at a glance
| Dates | 22 to 24 September 2026 |
| Venue | NEC Birmingham |
| Format | B2B exhibition and conference |
| Exhibitors | 500+ (some organiser figures cite 600+) |
| Speakers | 250+ |
| 2025 attendance | 20,000+ registered professionals |
| Entry | Free with registration |
| Co-located event | EVCharge Live UK |
From solar panel to distributed energy resource
A solar array on its own is a passive generator. What makes modern solar and storage valuable to the grid is the intelligence wrapped around it. An inverter reports generation, faults and performance. A battery energy storage system tracks state of charge, temperature and cycle health. An energy management system decides when to store, when to export and when to draw from the grid. A smart meter records what crosses the boundary. On larger sites a controller ties these together.
Aggregate thousands of these sites and you have a virtual power plant: a fleet of distributed assets that can be dispatched together to provide grid services such as frequency response and demand flexibility. None of that works without a communications layer carrying telemetry out and control signals back. This is remote-monitoring and remote-control IoT, at national scale.
The protocols behind connected solar and storage
Solar and storage equipment tends to speak a familiar set of industrial and IoT protocols. Inverters and battery systems commonly expose data over Modbus, often alongside the SunSpec models that standardise how solar and storage devices describe themselves. Site gateways and cloud platforms frequently use MQTT to move telemetry efficiently over constrained links. From there the data lands in monitoring and energy-management platforms for performance analytics, alerting and dispatch.
The architecture is the same one that appears across industrial IoT: field devices, a local gateway or router, a communications network, a cloud platform and a stream of operational data. And it raises the same core question that faces every distributed deployment: how do you keep geographically scattered sites reliably connected?
Why cellular connectivity suits solar and storage
Plenty of solar and storage assets sit exactly where fixed broadband does not reach, or where relying on the host site's network is awkward. Ground-mount solar farms occupy open land. Battery storage frequently lives in containerised units at substations or industrial yards. Commercial rooftop systems sit on buildings whose corporate IT the operator would rather not touch. In all of these, a dedicated cellular connection keeps the energy asset separate from other networks, simplifies commissioning and gets a site online quickly: fit the router, insert the IoT SIM, configure the APN, and the asset has its own managed link.
| Asset or scenario | Typical connectivity | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Residential rooftop PV | Home broadband or Wi-Fi | Consumer site, low criticality |
| Commercial rooftop PV and BESS | 4G router, private APN | Separation from tenant IT, secure remote O&M |
| Ground-mount or utility solar farm | 4G/5G router, external antenna, dual-SIM | Remote field, no fixed line, uptime critical |
| Grid-scale BESS or VPP asset | 4G/5G with failover and VPN | Responds to grid signals, control-critical |
Why multi-network IoT SIMs make sense
Coverage is one of the biggest considerations when assets are spread across the country. A network that performs well at one solar farm may be weak at the next. A roaming or multi-network IoT SIM can access several available networks, which improves resilience and removes the need to survey and procure a different operator SIM for every site.
A multi-network SIM does not hop between operators every few seconds as signal fluctuates. Network selection and roaming behaviour is more nuanced than that. What it does provide is deployment flexibility and resilience across a distributed estate, which matters when your assets are dispatched for grid services and a dropped connection has commercial consequences.
Grid services raise the stakes on reliability
When a battery site simply logs its own performance, an occasional connectivity gap is an inconvenience. When that same site is enrolled in a flexibility or frequency-response scheme, connectivity becomes part of the commercial product. The aggregator needs to know the asset is available, needs to dispatch it on time and needs confirmation that it responded. Multiply that across a portfolio and the telecommunications layer stops being a background utility and becomes operationally critical.
This is where design choices such as automatic failover, sensible retry logic and dual-SIM redundancy earn their keep. The connectivity does not need to be exotic. It needs to be dependable and predictable.
The security question nobody should skip
Grid-connected inverters and battery systems are not just data sources. Many can be configured, updated and controlled remotely, which is precisely what makes them useful for grid services and precisely why they warrant careful security. A large, remotely controllable fleet of energy assets is an attractive target, and concentration of control creates systemic risk that regulators and network operators are increasingly alert to.
Sensible practice mirrors wider operational-technology security: segment the energy assets from other networks, use private APNs or VPNs rather than exposing devices to the open internet, restrict traffic with firewalling to only the destinations required, keep firmware current, and monitor for anomalous behaviour. Connectivity architecture and security architecture are the same conversation, and it is far cheaper to get right at design stage than to retrofit across a deployed estate.
Industrial routers and edge at the energy site
Some inverters and storage systems include cellular connectivity directly. Larger or more complex sites often use a dedicated industrial router instead, which can serve several devices while giving the operator far more control. The features that matter here are familiar from any serious industrial deployment:
- Dual-SIM resilience – two SIMs for redundancy across networks.
- Automatic WAN failover – fixed line as primary with cellular as backup, or the reverse.
- VPN connectivity – secure tunnels back to monitoring and control platforms.
- Firewalling – traffic restricted to required services and destinations.
- Remote management – the router itself monitored and updated remotely.
- External antennas – to recover signal from metal enclosures and remote fields.
- Edge processing – local control, buffering and analytics where cloud round-trips are too slow or a link is intermittent.
For a primer on choosing between hardware tiers, see our guide to cellular router classifications, and on the trade-off between public and private addressing, private vs public IP for cellular IoT.
Antennas matter more than the field suggests
Battery storage frequently lives inside steel containers, and remote solar farms sit in open country with the modem tucked inside a metal cabinet. Both are hostile to radio. As with any cellular deployment, an external or directional antenna sited where the signal is actually usable often makes the difference between a reliable link and a site that drops out under load. Reliable connectivity starts with radio planning, not the SIM card. Our IoT antenna directory is a useful place to match antenna type to site.
Conference highlights
The programme spans utility-scale, storage and commercial and industrial solar, with sessions on distributed energy resources, grid capacity and connections, project financing, policy and market trends. Alongside the show floor there are live product demonstrations, training and installer workshops, a recruitment zone and a start-up area for emerging technology. The Solar & Storage Live Awards return, marking their fourteenth year of recognising work across the sector.
The distributed-energy and grid-connection threads are the ones worth an IoT professional's time. As more generation and storage connects at the edge of the network, the coordination problem grows, and coordination is a connectivity, telemetry and control problem before it is anything else.
Where solar, storage and EV charging converge
The co-location with EVCharge Live UK is not a scheduling convenience, it is a signal. A modern commercial site might combine rooftop or canopy solar, a battery system, EV chargers and a site controller that balances all three against grid prices and available capacity. Each element is a connected device, and the whole becomes a small, actively managed energy system. The same connectivity toolkit, industrial routers, IoT SIMs, private APNs, VPNs and well-planned antennas, serves all of it.
Who should visit?
The event is aimed at industry professionals. The obvious visitors are solar and storage installers, developers and asset owners, but the useful audience is wider: distribution network operators and energy suppliers looking at flexibility, local authorities planning community energy, commercial property owners weighing on-site generation and storage, and investors tracking where capital is flowing. For IoT and telecommunications specialists, the draw is the connectivity requirement created by a rapidly expanding fleet of distributed, controllable energy assets.
Solar and storage is becoming a distributed IoT market
The visible part of the industry is panels, inverters and battery cabinets. The part that makes it work as a coordinated system is the layer behind them: the telemetry, the remote control, the aggregation platforms and the networks that connect thousands of sites into something the grid can rely on. For many deployments, straightforward 4G with a well-chosen IoT SIM will remain the sensible answer. Others will run fixed connectivity with cellular failover, and the most critical grid-services assets will justify resilient, secured, actively managed links.
Solar & Storage Live UK is a good place to see the hardware. It is an even better prompt to think about everything behind it, because Britain's clean-energy transition is quietly building one of the largest distributed IoT estates the country has ever run.
Frequently asked questions
When and where is Solar & Storage Live UK 2026?
Solar & Storage Live UK 2026 takes place from 22 to 24 September 2026 at the NEC in Birmingham, co-located with EVCharge Live UK. Entry is free with registration.
Why do solar and battery storage sites need cellular connectivity?
Many solar and storage assets sit where fixed broadband is absent or where using the host site's network is impractical, such as ground-mount farms, containerised battery systems and commercial rooftops. A cellular connection keeps the energy asset on its own managed link, simplifies commissioning and gets remote sites online quickly for monitoring and control.
What protocols do solar inverters and battery systems use for monitoring?
Inverters and battery systems commonly expose data over Modbus, often using SunSpec models that standardise how solar and storage devices describe themselves. Gateways and cloud platforms frequently use MQTT to move telemetry efficiently. The data then feeds monitoring and energy-management platforms for analytics, alerting and dispatch.
How do multi-network SIMs help distributed solar and storage estates?
Assets spread across the country face varying coverage, so a roaming or multi-network SIM that can use several available networks improves resilience and removes the need to procure a different operator SIM per site. It does not switch networks second by second, but it makes rollout across many locations far simpler and more robust.
