PSDS Phase 4 and Solar Carports: Closed Since November 2024

What Phase 4 was, and when it closed

Phase 4 was the final phase of the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme. Its application window ran from mid-October to November 2024 and has not reopened. The gov.uk scheme collection, last updated on 13 March 2025, lists Phases 1 to 4 only and announces no further phase. Any page, adviser or supplier telling a public body to “apply to PSDS” in 2026 is describing something that does not exist. If a successor is announced it will appear on the government’s find-a-grant service, which is the only list worth planning against.

Why a solar carport was never a 100% PSDS grant

PSDS was heat-led. Grant followed the replacement of fossil-fuel heating — typically a gas boiler swapped for a heat pump — and other measures, solar included, were fundable only where they sat inside that same bid and supported the heat project. A standalone canopy over a car park did not qualify on its own merits, however good its economics. The widely repeated line that PSDS “funds up to 100% of capex for solar carports” conflated the scheme’s headline grant rate with a scope it never had — and the scheme has been closed to new applications since November 2024 in any case.

What a public body can use instead

Four routes remain. Capital or prudential borrowing, with the business case carried by the energy saving rather than a grant. A power purchase agreement, where a funder owns the asset and sells the electricity at a fixed rate below grid retail — no capex, but the saving is shared. The OZEV Workplace Charging Scheme, worth £500 per charging socket to a 40-socket cap since 1 April 2026, or £2,000 per socket for state-funded schools — note this funds the charging hardware, not the canopy. And the Smart Export Guarantee for generation exported rather than used on site.

Devolved programmes: check your nation

Salix Finance administers public-sector energy programmes on behalf of government, and what exists differs by nation rather than as one UK-wide fund. There is no open England public-sector loan for a project of this type. Scottish and Welsh public bodies should check their own government’s current programme — the Welsh Government Energy Service for Welsh bodies, and the Scottish Government route for Scottish ones — and confirm the live position before a scheme is written into a capital paper.

How to write the business case without a grant

A carport business case that never relied on grant is the one that survives. Size the array against the site’s own daytime load, because self-consumed generation is worth the full retail rate while export earns the SEG rate. Take the yield from PVGIS at the site’s own latitude and a 10° canopy pitch rather than a rooftop assumption. Put the charging hardware in its own cost line so the OZEV grant is visible against it. Then show payback on the saving alone — if it works there, any future scheme is upside rather than the premise.

Related reading: EV canopy costs and design · commercial solar carports · why full expensing does not cover solar.