How much do solar panels for breweries cost?

What drives the cost of brewery solar

The single biggest factor is system size, and the cost per kWp falls as the system grows because the fixed costs, scaffold, design, the DNO application, commissioning, are spread across more panels. A small craft-brewery array of 20 to 50 kWp usually lands around £800 to £1,100 per kWp, a mid-size 50 to 200 kWp system around £700 to £900, and a large regional array above 250 kWp around £550 to £700. Those are ex-VAT, supply-and-install figures for a standard trapezoidal or standing-seam industrial roof. We size the array to your electrical load, led by refrigeration, not to your roof area or your total energy bill, so the honest starting point is 12 months of your half-hourly meter data.

The hidden costs a proper survey surfaces

The headline £/kWp is not the whole picture, and a specialist tells you the rest up front. The most common extras on a brewery are a G99 grid-connection cost where the network needs reinforcement, a structural upgrade where an older brewhouse roof or one carrying tank and silo loads has little spare capacity, and, most significantly, a re-roof where a pre-2000 building has asbestos-cement sheeting that cannot take rooftop PV directly. On a listed brewery there may be a Listed Building Consent cost. None of these are hidden if the survey is done properly, which is why our proposal is fixed price: what you sign is what you pay. See the FAQs for how we handle older and listed buildings.

The tax relief you can actually claim (and the one you can’t)

Solar PV is special-rate plant for capital allowances. That matters because it means the Annual Investment Allowance gives a profitable company 100% first-year relief on the first £1m of qualifying spend, which covers virtually every brewery install, worth up to about 25% of the cost as a corporation-tax saving in year one. What solar does not qualify for is full expensing or the new 40% first-year allowance, both of which are main-rate only, so any installer quoting you "full expensing on solar" has it wrong. Above the £1m cap, solar gets a 50% first-year allowance and then a 6% writing-down allowance on the balance. The VAT is standard-rated at 20% and fully reclaimable for a VAT-registered brewery, so it is a cash-flow item, not a cost; the 0% VAT rate you may have read about is domestic-only. Always confirm your own position with your accountant.

A worked example: a regional brewery

Take a regional brewery producing around 100,000 hectolitres a year, using roughly 1,000,000 kWh of electricity, on a large distribution-centre roof. A 500 kWp array (about 3,000 m² of roof) generates around 425,000 kWh a year at a UK yield of 850 kWh/kWp, covering about 42% of demand. Because the continuous refrigeration base load absorbs most of the daytime output, self-consumption runs around 85%, so roughly 361,000 kWh is used on site and 64,000 kWh exported. At a 20p/kWh import price for a large half-hourly site and a 12p SEG export rate, that is about £72,000 of avoided grid cost plus £7,700 of export income, roughly £80,000 a year, before the Climate Change Levy saving on top. The system costs about £325,000 ex-VAT at £650/kWp; the Annual Investment Allowance returns about £81,000 of that in year one, so the net capex is around £244,000 and the simple payback is about 4 years, or nearer 3.2 years once the tax relief is netted off. Every figure here is illustrative and flagged; smaller breweries pay a higher import rate, around 25 to 27p, so they save more per kWh. Get a figure for your own site with our savings calculator.

Financing: you may not need the capital at all

Most brewery installs we deliver are not paid for out of capital, which matters in a sector where cash is tight. Asset finance spreads the cost over five to seven years and is usually cash-flow positive from month one, because the finance payment is smaller than the bill it replaces. A Power Purchase Agreement needs no capex at all: a funder owns the array and you buy the power at a fixed rate below grid, which suits tenants and shorter leases. A cash purchase gives the fastest payback and the full Annual Investment Allowance benefit. We model all three against each other so you can compare like for like, and we set the routes out in full on the grants and funding page.