Welcome to the Next Gen Home – a home that thinks for you

It’s a moment many of us know well. You’re in the kitchen on a cold morning, the boiler rattling into life, the car iced over on the drive, and a roof above you that could be doing more than just keeping the rain out. 

Somewhere between an energy bill dropping through the letterbox and yet another headline about the climate crisis, the thought creeps in: there must be a better way than this. 

And for a long time, that feeling has been right. The problem is, the system hasn’t kept up. Home energy has been piecemeal, complicated and, too often, unaffordable. 

Clean technologies have been treated like optional extras — solar panels here, a battery there, maybe a heat pump if you’re feeling bold — each one bringing its own admin, its own costs, and its own headaches. Too often, people have had to adapt their lives to fit the energy system, instead of the system fitting around them.

Next Gen Home is here to change that.  

What exactly is Next Gen Home?  

Next Gen Home is an ambitious pilot designed to reimagine how energy works in the home. At its heart, it gives customers an all-in-one energy package that makes low-carbon technologies easier and more affordable to use. 

Through a single fixed monthly fee, participating homeowners can benefit from:  

• Solar panels that harness the sun's power to generate clean electricity for your home  

• Batteries to store excess solar energy ready for use when the sun isn't shining, or when electricity prices are higher  

• Super-efficient heat pumps  providing home heating by drawing warmth from the air or ground

• EV chargers to juice up electric vehicles conveniently and cost-effectively  

• A cutting-edge smart home energy management system which acts as the brains of the operation, seamlessly integrating all these elements to optimise energy use and cost savings  

By bundling these technologies and services together, Next Gen Home makes low-carbon living more accessible, predictable, and affordable—helping households adopt to cleaner, more affordable energy, without the upfront financial burden.  

At E.ON, we started with a simple question: ‘What if energy actually worked around the home and the customer?’ 

We thought what if warmth, comfort and clean power weren’t things you had to actively manage, research or finance, like a second job – but a service that simply worked? Next Gen Home is our attempt to answer that question in the real world. 

Next Gen Home is an ambitious, market-first pilot that reimagines what energy can be when you design it as a joined-up experience rather than a collection of parts.  
 
At its heart is a modular, all-inclusive package that brings together the technologies modern homes need – solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, EV chargers – and wraps them in intelligent software and a fully managed service. It’s one monthly payment, no upfront costs, no juggling suppliers, no technical know-how required.  

The effect is subtle but profound - solar panels quietly harvest the sun’s energy during the day, batteries that then store it for the moments that matter – evenings, peak prices, grey winter afternoons. Heat pumps that deliver steady, efficient warmth without combustion or carbon. EV chargers turn the driveway into the cheapest, cleanest fuel station ever.  
 
And above it all sits a smart energy management system – the brains of the operation – constantly optimising when and how energy is used, without customers needing to lift a finger. This isn’t about selling kit, it’s about delivering a  comfortable, warm, reliable, and lower-carbon home, that works around real lives. 

The biggest barrier to sustainable homes has never been the technology, it’s been access, affordability. The upfront costs alone have locked millions of households out of the transition, turning climate action into something only the wealthy could contemplate.  

Next Gen Home removes that barrier entirely, and that matters - not just environmentally, but socially. By spreading the cost into a single, fixed monthly fee – covering installation, maintenance, optimisation and green energy – we’re making clean upgrades achievable for far more homes across the UK.  

Behind the scenes, Next Gen Home is also something else – a live experiment in what Energy-as-a-Service could look like when it’s designed properly.  

What is Energy as a Service? 

Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS) means customers pay for results — like a warm home — rather than having to buy and manage energy equipment themselves.  

The provider installs and looks after everything, from designing and installing the system to paying for it and keeping it running properly over time, so you don’t have to. 

This means little or no upfront cost, cheaper, more predictable bills, and energy systems that automatically run when energy is cheapest.

We’re learning – quickly – how people actually interact with Smart Energy in their homes. We’re getting smarter about where complexity creeps in; what needs to be invisible; how crucial trust, support and service really are when you’re asking customers to try something genuinely new. 

And the insights are already reshaping what comes next. We’re now watching how integrated systems perform when they’re treated as one organism, not five separate upgrades. We’re understanding the operational realities of installing and managing multiple assets at scale.  

And, perhaps most importantly, we’re learning how to make energy feel more human – less like infrastructure, more like a service that quietly improves everyday life. 

This is why we’ve partnered with some of the best in the industry: specialists in solar, storage, heat, charging and smart software whose technologies are built to work together, not just sit side-by-side.  
 
Quality, reliability and integration aren’t nice-to-haves when it comes to this innovation – they’re fundamental. 

Next Gen Home isn’t a glossy, false promise about the future. It’s happening now, in real homes, with real families. It’s a glimpse of what’s possible when we stop asking people to navigate complexity and start taking responsibility for delivering simplicity. 

We don’t pretend this solves everything. But it does point in a different direction – one where clean energy isn’t a puzzle to be solved or a luxury to aspire to, but a seamless part of everyday life. Affordable, predictable and designed around how people live life. 

For decades, energy has been something done to households, Next Gen Home is about doing it for them. 

And once you see what’s possible when energy finally works around the home – not the other way around – it will be very hard to imagine why we would ever go back.