Cideries & Cider Makers: Solar panels for breweries

Why cider makers are one of the strongest solar candidates in drinks production

If you press, ferment and package cider, your energy profile sits close to a craft brewery's, but with one decisive advantage. Cider skips the wort boil. There is no equivalent of the brewery's hot-liquor and steam demand that locks up roughly 70% of a brewer's energy in heat that solar PV cannot directly touch. Your process is fermentation-led and cold-side: milling, pressing, chilled juice storage, temperature-controlled fermentation, cleaning and packaging. That makes cider making a more electrically-dominated business than brewing, and electricity is exactly what a rooftop array produces. Pound for pound of energy spend, a cidery typically captures more of a solar system's output than a brewery does.

The honest caveat: you still carry thermal loads solar can't cover directly. Hot water for CIP, and pasteurisation if you flash- or tunnel-pasteurise before packaging, run on gas or an immersion element, and no roof array eliminates them. What solar attacks is your electrical base load, and in a cidery that base load is large and steady.

Your load profile: round-the-clock chilling plus a sharp autumn peak

Two things define a cidery's demand. First, refrigeration and temperature control run continuously, chilled juice tanks, cool fermentation, cold conditioning and finished-product storage don't switch off overnight or at weekends. That constant draw is why self-consumption on a well-sized cidery array usually lands in the 75-90% band: you use most of what you generate on site rather than exporting it cheaply.

Second, pressing season is a spike. Through the autumn pressing window, roughly September to November, your mills, presses and pumps run hard across the working day, and that peak falls squarely in daylight hours. Solar yield is easing off its summer high by then, so the array won't cover the whole pressing surge, but it does shave the most expensive daytime kilowatt-hours precisely when your milling and pressing lines draw hardest.

Sizing and cost

Most cideries land between 30 kW and 200 kW, depending on volume and how much cold storage you run. As a rule of thumb that is roughly £24,000 for a 30 kW roof on a farm building up to about £160,000 for a 200 kW estate system, at today's ~£550-1,100 per kWp installed, smaller roofs sit at the top of that band, larger barn- or ground-scale systems at the bottom. At UK yields of about 850 kWh per kWp per year, and with self-consumption that high, a typical cidery sees payback in around five years on a system that keeps working for 25-plus. Our cost breakdown shows the full sizing-to-payback maths, or go straight to a tailored quote.

The buyer: farm diversification, roof-rich and rural

Most cider is made on or beside a farm, and that shapes the opportunity in your favour. You likely have large, unshaded barn and shed roofs, orchard estates are rarely short of roof, and often the option of a ground-mount array on non-productive land. Solar also reinforces the story you already sell: orchard-to-glass provenance, low food miles and a working landscape. Stockists and drinkers increasingly ask about it, and a metered on-site array is a claim you can actually evidence rather than greenwash.

Planning and compliance: farm rules, food rules, listed barns

As a rural food producer you sit under a specific set of rules. Roof-mounted panels on your non-domestic farm and production buildings generally fall under permitted development in England via a prior-approval application, which keeps most rooftop schemes straightforward. A ground-mount array is different: beyond small thresholds it needs a full planning application, and orchard, AONB or Green Belt settings add scrutiny, so budget time for it. Many cideries also work out of historic stone barns or cider houses, if yours is listed, panels need Listed Building Consent regardless of permitted development. And because you are a food business, roof works must respect retained Regulation (EC) 852/2004 hygiene requirements: no contamination of production areas during the install and proper reinstatement afterwards. Electrically, a system this size connects under G99 with your DNO, typically National Grid Electricity Distribution across the West Country cider heartland, usually with G100 export limitation on a three-phase supply.

Tax and funding

Commercial solar is special-rate plant for capital allowances (HMRC CA22335), which means it qualifies for the Annual Investment Allowance, 100% relief in year one on up to £1m of qualifying spend. Note it is specifically excluded from full expensing and from the 40% main-rate first-year allowance, so ignore any installer who claims either applies. VAT is charged at 20% but is fully reclaimable if you are VAT-registered; the 0% rate is domestic-only and never applies to a cidery. Export earns a supplier-set Smart Export Guarantee rate of roughly 12-16p per kWh. In England, on-site solar and battery storage are exempt from business rates until 31 March 2035, and self-generated electricity sits outside the Climate Change Levy entirely. Farm-diversification and rural energy funding move regularly, our grants and funding page tracks what is genuinely open, and whether your output qualifies for a Climate Change Agreement is worth checking rather than assuming.

Get a cidery-specific figure

Every cidery is different, pressing volume, how much you chill, roof pitch and orientation, whether you would add a ground-mount. Tell us your site and annual production and we will model the array, the self-consumption, the payback and the allowances against your actual bills. No phone calls, no pressure, just the numbers. Request your quote and we will come back with a tailored assessment.