Owner-Occupied Trade Premises, Yorkshire — 110 kWp

This is a representative project profile, not a named real client. The figures below are illustrative and modelled on the kind of light-industrial freeholder we work with across Yorkshire — a trade-counter operator who owns its own Leeds premises outright. We publish it as an illustration rather than dressing up a single real deal, which keeps the numbers honest and lets you check our method against your own building.

Why owner-occupiers have the best economics

When the party that owns the roof is also the party that pays the electricity bill, the split incentive that complicates most commercial solar simply does not exist. There is no landlord recovering capital from a tenant, no PPA tariff to negotiate, no roof lease to draft. The owner pays for the system and the owner keeps every pound of saving and every pound of tax relief. That is why we treat owner-occupied freeholds as the simplest case to underwrite — and usually the most profitable per kWp installed.

A trade counter is close to an ideal load profile for it. The premises draws power through the working day, exactly when the panels generate, so a high share of what the roof produces is consumed on site rather than exported. Self-consumption is the single biggest driver of return on any commercial array: a self-consumed unit displaces grid electricity at roughly 24–28p/kWh, whereas an exported unit earns a Smart Export Guarantee rate of around 12–16p. Designing the system to be consumed, not exported, is most of the work.

The build

We sized the array from half-hourly meter data rather than from roof area. The premises was on a small-business tariff at roughly 28.6p/kWh (ex VAT and CCL) and ran a steady daytime base load across counter, warehouse lighting, compressors and forklift charging. The data showed that an array of around 110 kWp could be almost entirely absorbed on site without a battery — the daytime demand was high enough to soak up generation through the working week, with only modest weekend export.

At a Yorkshire yield of roughly 950 kWh/kWp/yr, 110 kWp produces about 104,500 kWh a year. We modelled self-consumption in the low-to-mid 90s for this load, which is what pushes the saving up: nearly all of that generation displaces 28.6p grid units rather than being sold at the lower export rate. Roof structure, a G99 connection above 50 kW with the regional DNO, and a 56-day prior-approval check under permitted development Class J were handled before any panel was ordered. The 1 MW cap on commercial rooftop solar was removed in December 2023, so headroom was never the constraint here — grid and roof loading were.

The tax position

Solar PV counts as an integral feature and sits in the special rate pool, so the relevant relief for this owner is the Annual Investment Allowance. The AIA gives a 100% first-year deduction on qualifying plant up to £1m a year (a permanent limit), and the full system cost fell well within it. That means the owner wrote off the entire capital cost against taxable profit in year one rather than depreciating it slowly — a material cash-flow benefit that shortens the effective payback. Note this is AIA, not the 50% First-Year Allowance that solar attracts under full expensing; for an owner-occupier buying the asset for its own use, AIA is the cleaner route. A worked breakdown sits in our capital allowances guide for owners.

On top of the income-tax saving, rooftop solar and co-located storage are 100% exempt from business rates in England to 31 March 2035, so the array adds nothing to the rates bill. As an owner-occupier the freeholder is the rates payer in any case, so that exemption lands squarely with the party that funded the system.

The outcome

On these assumptions the array saves on the order of £26,000 a year against grid spend at current prices. Set against the installed cost and after the first-year AIA deduction, the simple payback works out at about 4.6 years, with the system warranted to keep producing for far longer. The building’s EPC moved from E to C. We are careful here: solar typically lifts a commercial EPC by one to three bands and never guarantees a fixed jump, so an E-to-C uplift reflects this building’s starting point and fabric, not a promise that every property will do the same. It does, however, move the asset clear of the EPC E minimum that has made it unlawful to let sub-E commercial property in England and Wales since 1 April 2023 — useful protection if the owner ever decides to let or sell.

Illustrative quote

“We weren’t trying to be green for its own sake. We own the building, we pay the bill, and the sums only had to work once. Writing the whole cost off in year one was the part our accountant cared about.” — illustrative owner-occupier, representative of clients we work with.

If you own and occupy your own commercial premises, you are in the strongest position of any building owner to make solar pay — no split incentive to engineer, 100% of the saving kept, and the capital relief landing with you. We will size a system from your actual half-hourly data, model the self-consumption honestly and show you the after-tax payback before you commit. Start with a no-obligation quote, or read more about how we structure projects for owner-occupied commercial property.