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In the UK, solar is fairly ineffective in the winter as the sun barely comes over the horizon for not many hours a day.

I import more than I export in December and January, but for every other month of the year it’s the reverse by some margin. My annual electricity bill is net negative, and the installation cost will be paid off in 7 years. The numbers would be even better in, say, Spain, but they are perfectly adequate here, despite suboptimal latitude.

Incidentally, the grid only knows about my exports. Self-consumption manifests as demand reduction, so UK solar production and electricity consumption is probably higher than aggregate figures suggest.

It's helped a lot by the fact that solar panels have become very cheap indeed, so the fact that we don't get as much sun as other places doesn't matter so much - it will still pay off, as long as you can actually use that energy effectively (which may require batteries or a decent export payment rate).

True, but if you get cheap power from solar for the rest of the year, and charge the battery from the grid off peak when there's no solar to charge, you should end up paying less than just the standard rate.

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