Businesses
Independent advice for UK businesses on solar, battery storage and grid connection, from a consultancy that does not install and has nothing to sell you.
Eco Connect Services is an independent renewable energy consultancy. We do not install anything, we do not sell equipment, and we do not hold or claim any installer accreditation. That is the whole basis of the advice: we have nothing to sell you, so there is no product the answer has to be.
We look at your buildings, your supply, your consumption pattern and what the business is actually trying to achieve, and we tell you what is worth pursuing and in what order. Where work is appropriate, it is carried out by a vetted delivery partner, and the final technical advice and the quotation come from them.
Not every roof is a candidate, not every business has the daytime demand to make self-consumption work, and not every site has a straightforward connection. Where that is the position, we say so before you have spent anything on it.
You will find a great many payback and return figures for commercial solar online. They are almost all published by companies selling installations, against a site that is not yours. We do not reproduce them and we would treat them with caution.
A commercial building is not a large house, and almost none of the domestic guidance transfers cleanly. The questions below are the ones that actually change the answer, and they are the reason a business decision takes longer than a domestic one.
A domestic decision can be made on an annual consumption total. A commercial one cannot. What matters is the shape of demand across the working day and across the year: when you draw hardest, what your overnight base load is, and how much of the middle of the day you are actually occupying. If your meter records half-hourly data, ask your supplier for it and get it before anyone designs anything. A proposal built on an annual kilowatt-hour total is a guess wearing a spreadsheet.
Electricity you generate and use yourself displaces electricity you would have bought. Electricity you export earns whatever your export tariff pays, which is a different and generally much smaller number. So the value of a commercial array is set by the proportion of its output you consume on site. A single-shift weekday operation, a seven-day operation and an office that empties at four o'clock produce three completely different answers from the same roof.
Buying outright, leasing the equipment, and a power purchase agreement where a third party owns the system on your roof and sells you the output are three different propositions with three different balance-sheet and contractual consequences. None of them is automatically right. What they have in common is that the contract, not the technology, is where the risk sits, so read it, and have your own adviser read it.
Remaining lease term, landlord consent, reinstatement obligations at the end of the term, roof loading and who owns the roof itself all have to be settled before the engineering matters. If you are the landlord rather than the occupier, note that since 1 April 2023 the minimum energy efficiency standard has applied to all privately rented non-domestic property in England and Wales, not only to new lettings, so a let building at EPC F or G cannot continue to be let unless a valid exemption is registered. One of the registered exemptions exists precisely because third-party consent could not be obtained, which tells you how often that is the blocker. Source: DESNZ, "Non-domestic private rented property: minimum energy efficiency standard, landlord guidance", sections 1 and 4, last updated 5 May 2026. Checked 19 August 2026. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/non-domestic-private-rented-property-minimum-energy-efficiency-standard-landlord-guidance
Two separate regimes catch larger organisations and neither is optional. Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting requires UK quoted companies, large unquoted companies incorporated in the UK and large limited liability partnerships to disclose energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in the directors' report. Separately, the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme is a mandatory energy assessment scheme, administered by the Environment Agency, under which qualifying large undertakings must carry out an assessment every four years; the Phase 4 compliance deadline is 5 December 2027. A large undertaking, for the last qualification date, meant one employing 250 or more people, or with turnover above £44 million and a balance sheet total above £38 million. If either applies to you, generation is a reporting question as well as a cost question, and the two should be scoped together rather than sequentially. Sources: DESNZ, Defra and BEIS, "Environmental reporting guidelines: including Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting requirements", checked 19 August 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/environmental-reporting-guidelines-including-mandatory-greenhouse-gas-emissions-reporting-guidance; DESNZ and Environment Agency, "Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS)", last updated 16 February 2026, checked 19 August 2026, https://www.gov.uk/guidance/energy-savings-opportunity-scheme-esos
The zero rate on installing energy-saving materials, which includes solar panels and battery storage, applies to installations in residential accommodation and in buildings used solely for a relevant charitable purpose. A commercial building is neither. The relief is also time-limited: it runs to 31 March 2027, after which these installations revert to the reduced rate of 5 per cent in qualifying buildings. Note the edge cases, because they catch people both ways: self-catering holiday accommodation counts as residential accommodation, while hotels, inns and similar establishments are standard-rated. If a quotation you are given assumes zero-rated VAT on a commercial building, ask why. Your accountant should confirm the position before you rely on it. Source: HMRC, "Energy-saving materials and heating equipment (VAT Notice 708/6)", sections 2.1, 2.7, 2.21 and 2.22, last updated 31 January 2024. Checked 19 August 2026. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vat-on-energy-saving-materials-and-heating-equipment-notice-7086
There is no single right first step, but there is usually a right first question. Start with the one that matches your position.
Written for homeowners, but the method transfers: what a payback assumption is actually made of and which parts of it are guesses.
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Connecting generation is a separate permission from planning, and it does not come from your energy supplier. It comes from your distribution network operator, the company that owns the wires onto the site.
Which route applies depends on size. Below 3.68 kW per phase, Engineering Recommendation G98 applies. Above that, the more involved G99 route applies instead, and anything of a commercial scale is on the G99 route. Compliance is the responsibility of the customer, who is usually but not always the owner of the generation. In practice a competent installer makes the submission, but the obligation sits with you. Ask who is doing it, and get written confirmation that it was done.
Source: Energy Networks Association, "Connecting generation to the electricity networks". Checked 19 August 2026. This page was fetched earlier the same day for the AGW-044 deck and the fetch tool served the cached copy for this deck; the wording relied on is the wording recorded in that deck. https://www.energynetworks.org/industry/connecting-to-the-networks/connecting-generation-to-the-electricity-networks
What the connection costs, what reinforcement it triggers, how long it takes and whether you are asked to accept a limit on how much you can export are all decided by the network operator against your specific site. None of them is known until the offer exists. We are not going to publish a typical figure for any of them, because there is no primary source for one.
Where an operator limits export, it changes what is worth installing rather than ending the project, because the value was always in self-consumption. It is a reason to settle the connection position before ordering equipment, not a reason to abandon the idea.
The Smart Export Guarantee requires certain licensed electricity suppliers to pay small-scale generators for exported low-carbon electricity, and solar photovoltaic installations up to 5 MW in Great Britain are eligible subject to the criteria. The rate, the contract length and the other terms are set by the supplier. The only rule on the rate is that it must be above zero, and Ofgem's own advice is to shop around. Treat any export figure in a quotation as an assumption about a tariff you have not yet signed. Source: Ofgem, "Smart Export Guarantee (SEG)". Checked 19 August 2026, in the same session and with the same caching caveat as the ENA source above. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/environmental-and-social-schemes/smart-export-guarantee-seg
The national planning rules, including the permitted development position for non-domestic buildings and the changes taking effect on 27 August 2026, are set out on our planning hub rather than restated here: /insights/planning-and-costs/
Four stages, made concrete for a commercial site. Nothing here commits you to anything.
What the business does, which sites and which buildings are in play, what you are actually trying to fix, who has to approve it, and whether anything already planned would change the answer.
Roofs and their structural condition, orientation and shading, the incoming supply and its capacity, the half-hourly demand profile, the tenure and lease position, and any reporting obligation that the decision has to satisfy.
What is worth pursuing, what is not, and in what order, written in plain English with the reasoning shown so that it can be tested rather than taken on trust. If the recommendation is to do nothing yet, we say that, and we say why.
Where you choose to proceed, work is carried out by a vetted delivery partner. The final technical advice and the quotation come from them, not from us. We coordinate and we stay involved, but we do not price the work and we do not fit it.
The useful part of independent advice is the part that costs someone a sale. Some of the things we would say to a business before anything else:
If nobody has asked for your half-hourly data, nobody has established whether the system will be used. That is the single most common weakness in a commercial solar proposal.
Size to the load. A large array over a building with a small daytime demand produces a large export position, not a large saving, and export is not where the value is.
These are long contracts attached to your building, frequently with obligations that outlast the people who signed them. The technology is the easy part. The contract is not.
On the G99 route, the network operator's offer can change what is worth installing. Finding that out after the equipment is ordered is an expensive way to learn it.
Commercial payback is load-profile dependent. A figure calculated on somebody else's building, at somebody else's tariff, on an unstated date, is not evidence about yours. That is why there are no such figures on this page.
Information correct as of: 19 August 2026.
Tax rules, reporting obligations, planning rules and network connection requirements change. Every rule, scheme and threshold on this page is dated and linked to the government or regulator source it was taken from. Check the source before you rely on it.
Eco Connect is an independent advisory business. It does not carry out installations, holds no installer accreditation, and nothing on this page is planning, legal, accounting or tax advice.
Start with a free renewable consultation. We will listen to what you want to achieve, ask a few practical questions and help identify the most useful next step.
