Hospitality: Commercial Solar PV

Why commercial solar PV suits hospitality and leisure

Hospitality and leisure venues are heavy, sustained users of electricity, and that is precisely what makes them good candidates for commercial solar PV. A hotel, a busy pub, a restaurant, a gym or a spa runs kitchens, refrigeration, laundry, heating and cooling, hot water and often a swimming pool, and it runs them across a long trading day that frequently stretches into the evening. Grid electricity on a commercial contract now sits somewhere around 25p to 45p per kWh, roughly double the rate of three years ago, and every one of those units eats directly into the margin on a room, a cover or a membership.

On-site solar turns your roof, and in some cases a patch of adjacent land or a car park canopy, into a 25-year hedge against those prices. The array generates power during the working day, when a venue's lighting, cooling and kitchen prep loads are already high, so a large share of what it produces is consumed on site rather than exported at a lower rate. For a daytime-weighted operation that means real, permanent bill reduction. Just as usefully in this sector, a visible commitment to renewable generation is a genuine, customer-facing trust signal that supports green-tourism accreditation and helps win corporate and conference bookings where sustainability sits on the buyer's checklist.

The four features that define this sector's solar case are worth stating plainly. Kitchens, refrigeration, laundry, pools and HVAC create high, long-day and often evening load. Battery storage pairs well with that evening-weighted demand, catching midday generation and releasing it after the sun drops. Guest-facing sustainability supports accreditation and corporate bookings. And roof space varies enormously across the sector, so where a rooftop is short of demand, ground-mount and canopy options help larger venues make up the difference.

The hospitality load profile and self-consumption

Understanding when a venue uses power is more important than knowing how much roof it has. A typical office empties at 18:00 and its solar economics are straightforward. Hospitality is different. A hotel has a morning peak for breakfast service, hot water and laundry, a quieter midday, then a long evening ramp for the restaurant, bar and guest rooms. A restaurant is weighted heavily toward late afternoon and evening. A leisure centre or gym with a pool carries a steady pumping, filtration and heating load through most of the day and into the night.

Solar generates on the sun's schedule, peaking around midday and tailing off through the afternoon. Where the two curves overlap, the venue consumes its own generation directly and avoids buying that unit from the grid entirely. Where they do not overlap, the choice is to export the surplus for a lower rate under the Smart Export Guarantee, or to store it in a battery and use it in the evening. That is why accurate half-hourly modelling matters so much in this sector: the compliance notes for hospitality make the point directly, that pool and kitchen loads make precise half-hourly modelling essential to size the system correctly. Get it wrong and you either undersize and leave savings on the table, or oversize and dump cheap power onto the grid.

A daytime-occupied commercial building typically self-consumes 55 to 75 percent of its generation without a battery. For a venue with strong evening demand, adding storage lifts that figure toward 80 to 95 percent and materially improves the return. The usual design rule of thumb is annual generation equal to 60 to 85 percent of your consumption, which keeps self-consumption high and avoids paying to export power at a fraction of what it costs to buy back. See our savings calculator for a first-pass estimate, then have an installer refine it against your actual meter data.

System sizing for hospitality and leisure venues

Across this sector, a typical commercial solar PV system runs from 50 kW to 300 kW. That corresponds to roughly 92 to 550 panels and needs somewhere between 300 and 1,800 square metres of usable roof or ground. As a working figure, 1 kWp of PV occupies about 5 to 6 square metres and generates around 900 to 1,000 kWh a year in the UK, so a system in this band produces between 46,000 and 275,000 kWh annually and displaces between 10 and 63 tonnes of CO2 each year.

Those are ranges, not a prescription. A boutique 20-room hotel with a modest flat roof might land at the 50 kW end. A large hotel and conference complex, a holiday park with multiple buildings, or a leisure centre with a big single-span sports hall roof could reach 300 kW or beyond. Where the roof cannot carry enough capacity to match demand, a ground-mounted array on spare land or a solar carport over the guest car park closes the gap, and the carport doubles as covered parking and a natural home for EV charging.

A system should not be sized from roof area alone. Sizing starts with your annual energy spend and, crucially, the shape of your half-hourly consumption. That is the only reliable way to design a system that generates when you actually use power. The output should be a PVSyst yield model built from your meter data and roof drawings, and you should ask for the file so any third party can check the numbers. For a fuller breakdown of what a system costs to install, see our cost guide.

A worked cost and payback example

Typical project values in hospitality and leisure fall between £45,000 and £270,000 depending on system size, roof type and whether storage is included. Typical payback for the sector is around 7 years, a little longer than a warehouse or factory because a share of hospitality demand falls in the evening when the panels are not generating, which is exactly where a battery earns its place.

Take a mid-sized hotel with a 150 kW rooftop system as an illustration. At sector-typical pricing that project sits in the region of £120,000 to £145,000 before tax relief. It would generate roughly 135,000 to 150,000 kWh a year. The table below sets out how the economics stack up on plausible figures.

Item	Figure
System size	150 kW rooftop PV
Indicative installed cost	£120,000 to £145,000
Annual generation	135,000 to 150,000 kWh
Self-consumption (no battery)	60 to 75 percent
Typical annual saving plus export	£20,000 to £28,000
Simple payback	About 7 years
Annual CO2 avoided	Around 31 tonnes
Performance warranty	25 years

The tax position sharpens those numbers. 100 percent Annual Investment Allowance lets a profitable company deduct the full capital cost from its taxable profit in year one, an effective saving of roughly a quarter of the headline price for a company paying corporation tax. VAT is reclaimable for VAT-registered businesses, so the commercial VAT paid on the install comes back in the normal way. Note that this is a genuine reclaim through the VAT return, not the 0 percent rate that applies only to domestic installs. Add the Smart Export Guarantee income on any surplus, at roughly 4p to 15p per kWh depending on tariff, and the effective net cost drops well below the headline figure. The panels then carry a 25-year performance warranty, so once past payback the system delivers 15 to 20 years of near-free power.

Planning, compliance and grid connection

Most commercial rooftop PV falls under Permitted Development (Class J of Part 14 of the GPDO 2015), subject to size and siting limits, so many installs need no planning application at all. Hospitality carries one important exception the sector runs into more than most: listed and conservation-area buildings are common in this trade, from the coaching-inn pub to the grand seafront hotel, and a visible array on a listed building needs Listed Building Consent. Street-facing arrays in conservation areas often need planning permission too. A good installer confirms the planning route during the feasibility study and handles any application required, and where a frontage is sensitive will look at rear roofs, less visible pitches or ground and canopy options first.

On the electrical side, small commercial systems, roughly under 50 kW or 3.68 kW per phase, can sometimes use the faster G98 or G99 fast-track. Most systems in the hospitality band need a full G99 application to your Distribution Network Operator. Where the local network is constrained, export limitation under G100 is often used to secure a connection quickly and avoid costly reinforcement. DNO timescales run roughly 4 to 12 weeks for smaller connections and 6 to 18 months for larger ones, so the grid application is best submitted early, usually before the site survey, because it is almost always the critical path on the overall timeline.

A handful of other checks apply. Buildings constructed before 2000 need an Asbestos Management Survey before any roof work. The building's insurer should be notified, and most continue cover once the correct certification is in place. Solar also lifts the EPC rating, which helps with Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards and adds to asset value. Commercial work should be MCS-certified, with the installer NICEIC-registered and RECC or TrustMark licensed and an insurance-backed workmanship warranty on top of the manufacturer performance warranty.

Funding routes that fit the sector

Hospitality boards are often reluctant to sign off six figures of capital, and they rarely have to. There are three routes a good installer models side by side so you can compare the cash impact and the internal rate of return of each.

• Cash purchase. The simplest route and the lowest lifetime cost. Combined with 100 percent Annual Investment Allowance, a profitable company writes off the whole capital cost against taxable profit in year one, and VAT is reclaimable. Best where the business has the capital available and wants the strongest long-run return.
• Asset finance. The cost is spread over 5 to 7 years and is usually cash-flow positive from month one, because the monthly finance payment is less than the electricity bill saving it replaces. You own the system at the end. This suits venues that want the savings now without drawing down reserves.
• Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). Zero capital outlay. A funder installs and owns the system, and you simply buy the power it generates at a fixed rate below grid. A PPA transfers with the sale of the building, which matters for leased or frequently traded hospitality assets.

Beyond the finance structures, the Smart Export Guarantee pays for exported surplus, which is a meaningful part of the economics for venues that export a share of daytime generation. Some combined authorities and Growth Hubs periodically run regional SME decarbonisation grants, typically in the £5,000 to £50,000 range, though these windows open and close. It is worth checking what applies to your region and business before choosing a route. A full breakdown sits on our grants and funding page.

Worked example: hypothetical scenario

Consider a hypothetical 90-bedroom hotel and spa on the coast, running two kitchens, an in-house laundry, an indoor pool and year-round HVAC, with an annual electricity bill of £84,000. A business in that position would typically want to cut a rising bill without a large capital drawdown.

Half-hourly meter data for a hotel like this would typically show a strong daytime and mid-evening load, with the pool plant and laundry providing a steady baseline through the day. The main flat roof and an adjoining single-storey annexe together are assumed to offer enough unshaded area for a 180 kW array, and the modelled design adds a 100 kWh battery to shift midday generation into the early-evening restaurant peak. Modelled annual generation comes to about 165,000 kWh, with self-consumption reaching 84 percent once the battery is included.

On plausible figures the system would displace around £30,000 a year in grid electricity and export income, against an installed cost in the region of £180,000 before tax relief. Funded on a 7-year asset-finance agreement, the arrangement would be cash-flow positive from the first month, with the finance payment sitting below the monthly saving. After 100 percent AIA and reclaimed VAT the effective payback would land close to the sector-typical 7 years. These figures are illustrative of the sector, not a specific named project, and every real proposal should be modelled from that venue's own data.

Common questions about commercial solar for hospitality and leisure

Will solar cover our evening and overnight demand?

Not on its own. Solar generates during daylight, peaking around midday, so a venue with heavy evening load, such as a restaurant or a hotel with a busy bar and restaurant service, will still draw from the grid after dark unless it stores power. That is exactly where battery storage earns its place in this sector. A battery catches surplus midday generation and releases it into the evening peak, lifting self-consumption from the 55 to 75 percent typical of a daytime building toward 80 to 95 percent. A good installer models both PV-only and PV-plus-battery so you can see the difference in savings and payback, and designs every system to be battery-ready even if you add storage later.

Can we put solar on a listed hotel or a building in a conservation area?

Often yes, but the route is different. A listed building needs Listed Building Consent for any visible array, and street-facing roofs in conservation areas usually need planning permission. In practice a good installer starts with the least sensitive surfaces, rear roofs, hidden pitches, or a ground-mount or car-park canopy away from the protected frontage, so the array delivers the generation without touching the character of the building. The planning route is assessed during feasibility, with any consent or application needed handled before work starts.

How disruptive is the installation to a working venue?

The physical install for a system in the hospitality band typically takes 1 to 4 weeks, and most of the work happens on the roof rather than inside guest or trading areas. The work should be phased around your trading pattern, with the electrical tie-ins and any brief shutdowns done at quiet times and public areas kept clear. The longer part of the timeline is usually the DNO grid connection, 4 to 12 weeks for a smaller system, which runs in the background and does not disrupt trading. From signed contract to a commissioned system is generally 8 to 20 weeks.

Does a swimming pool or spa change the solar case?

It strengthens it, but it makes accurate sizing essential. A pool's pumping, filtration and heating create a large, steady load that runs across much of the day and often overnight, which raises daytime self-consumption and improves the return. The catch is that a badly sized system either fails to cover that baseline or overshoots it. Because pool and kitchen loads dominate a hospitality demand curve, the system should be modelled from your half-hourly data rather than a rule of thumb, so the array is matched to the load rather than guessed from roof area.

What happens to the system if we sell the hotel or the lease changes?

You have three routes, and a good installer models the right one around your expected tenure. An owned system can be sold with the building, and commercial premises with PV typically see a 5 to 15 percent uplift in value, or the array can be relocated for roughly 15 to 25 percent of the original cost. A PPA transfers with the sale of the building or continues at the original site, which is why it suits leased and frequently traded hospitality assets. An asset-financed system can be settled and sold on with the building at an agreed value.

Which other building types do you cover?

Commercial solar applies across the full range of UK commercial property. If your estate spans more than hospitality, our sector pages for retail and showrooms and the public sector and education cover the load profiles, funding and payback for those building types. When you are ready to move, request a quote.