Is solar worth it for a brewery?

This is the honest question and the reason to use a specialist. You are right that roughly 70% of a brewery's energy is thermal, the wort boil, hot liquor and steam, and solar PV cannot heat that directly. What solar does brilliantly is your electrical load, which is about a third of your energy and, crucially, the part that runs all day: refrigeration and glycol chilling alone are around 35% of your electricity and run 24/7 through fermentation. Because that demand sits under the solar curve, breweries self-consume 75 to 90% of what the array makes at your full import rate. We size the array to your electrical load, then, where it pays, we look at diverting surplus midday solar into your hot liquor tank or a heat pump to start chipping at the thermal side too. What we never do is pretend panels will wipe out your whole energy bill.

Plenty of brewery installs are on leased units. Where you own the building it is straightforward; where you lease, we work with landlord consent or a green-lease addendum, or fund the array through a Power Purchase Agreement where a funder owns the system and you simply buy the power below grid for the life of your lease, with no capital outlay. If your remaining term is short we size a smaller, faster-payback system or use a PPA so you are never out of pocket. We will tell you honestly if the tenure does not suit solar.

That is exactly why most brewery installs we deliver are not paid for out of capital. 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, so solar defends your margin rather than draining your reserves. A zero-capex PPA needs no money up front at all. If you do buy outright, the Annual Investment Allowance lets a profitable company deduct up to £1m of the cost from taxable profit in year one, and a VAT-registered brewery reclaims the VAT. We model cash, finance and PPA side by side so you can pick the route that protects your cash position.

You will not have to. Rooftop installs happen above and around your production, and the only mandatory outage is the final grid connection, typically four to eight hours, which we schedule for a weekend, a quiet period or a planned CIP window. We coordinate around your brew days, your cold-store and CO2 areas and your packaging runs, and we run a food-safety contamination plan so nothing drops into open vessels or lines. Fermentation cooling keeps running throughout.

Both are common with breweries and we check them first. Any building from before 2000 needs an asbestos management survey before we fix anything, and asbestos-cement roofs cannot take rooftop PV directly, the usual route is over-clad or re-roof, which can often be funded inside the same project. If your brewery is listed or in a conservation area, Permitted Development may not apply and we handle the Listed Building Consent or prior-approval route. Either way you will know the planning and roof position before you commit a penny, not after.

We model from your half-hourly meter data, not a rule of thumb, and we share the file. For a UK brewery with its continuous refrigeration baseload and daytime production, simple payback typically lands between four and seven years, faster on larger regional sites with big roofs and high self-consumption, a little longer on small nano units where fixed costs weigh more. We quote export income as a range because SEG rates are supplier-set and move, and we present tax relief as the Annual Investment Allowance, not the 'full expensing' several installers wrongly claim for solar. You can stress-test our model or feed it to your own accountant before you spend anything.