Alectrona
Commercial solar by areaAlectrona is Yorkshire-based and quick to reach Halifax and the wider Calderdale valley for commercial solar over 50 kWp. We have not yet installed in the town, so we lead with coverage, an in-house drone survey of the roof and a system modelled against your own half-hourly load. We do not claim a local job count we cannot show.
These are representative example reviews, not yet-collected customer feedback. They are written to illustrate the kind of feedback Alectrona aims to earn and are shown as design placeholders while we gather and verify reviews from our first commercial clients. Alectrona is the commercial solar trading brand of RVTC LTD.
What set Alectrona apart was the documented design pack. We had quotes from three installers, but only Alectrona handed us a full set of drawings, a single-line diagram and a design referencing BS 7671 and the G99 connection process. The whole thing read like an engineering submission rather than a sales brochure. Our M&E consultant reviewed it and signed it off without a single query. That gave the board the confidence to release the capital.
Other firms priced our roof off a satellite image and a desktop guess. Alectrona flew an in-house drone survey, fully insured and flown by a qualified commercial drone pilot, and built a 3D model of the actual roof. It picked up plant, vents and a parapet line that a flat aerial photo had completely missed, which changed the panel layout. I would rather find that out at design stage than on the day the scaffold goes up. The accuracy of that survey is the reason I trusted everything that followed.
As a finance director I was wary of being oversold a system bigger than we could use. Alectrona modelled the array against our actual half-hourly consumption data rather than an annual total, so it is sized to what we genuinely draw on site during the day. They were honest that exporting surplus is worth far less than self-consumption, and built the design around that. The capital case stacked up because the engineering was honest, not because the numbers were inflated.
We were undecided between buying outright, leasing and a PPA. Alectrona laid out all three side by side with the pros and cons of each against our balance sheet, instead of pushing the one that pays them best. They were clear about where a PPA makes sense and where capex wins, and pointed us at our own accountant for the tax treatment. The survey and design took a little longer than I expected, but the thoroughness was worth the wait. Genuinely consultative.
The install crew were tidy and well run, and worked to a clear CDM 2015 plan with a proper site induction and RAMS. What impressed me most was the handover. We received a full commissioning pack with the IEC 62446-1 test results, certification, O&M documentation and an as-built record for our maintenance team. As the people who have to live with this asset for the next twenty years, having that paperwork in order matters enormously. Nothing was left loose.
I expected the usual hard sell and got the opposite. After surveying our site Alectrona told us one roof section was not worth covering because of shading, and that a smaller, well-sited array was the better investment than filling every square metre. There was no commission-driven upselling and no pressure. For a six-figure capital project, that straight talk is exactly what you want from the people advising you. We will be using them again on our second site.
Halifax is the principal town of Calderdale, an eastern-Pennine mill town whose wealth was built on wool, worsted, carpets, machine tools and confectionery, and that history left a building stock dominated by large stone and brick roofs. Alectrona is the commercial arm of RVTC LTD, working the HX1 town centre out through HX2 and HX3 to the HX4 and HX5 districts towards Greetland and Elland, for rooftop and ground-mount solar above 50 kWp. We cover the wider valley from the same base, including Brighouse, Elland, Sowerby Bridge, Huddersfield and Bradford.
A system at this scale earns the engineering behind it. Above 50 kWp the array sits outside the domestic schemes, the structural and electrical stakes are higher, and the design has to be built around the building's real load rather than a roof-area estimate. Our own insured pilot flies a 3D drone survey of the roof, we take your half-hourly consumption data, and the array is modelled in PV*SOL before anything is priced. We are honest that this is coverage and capability rather than a list of finished Halifax installs.
Halifax's commercial roof stock falls into three genuinely distinct shapes, and each one drives a different solar case. The first is large-scale manufacturing. Nestlé has made Quality Street at Albion Mills on Bailey Hall Road, HX3 9XT, for more than eighty years, and the multi-shift confectionery production and warehousing across that site, which also turns out After Eight and Matchmakers lines, is the kind of broad, near-continuous daytime load that on-site solar offsets well. South of the centre, Marshalls plc, the listed landscaping and building-products manufacturer, runs heavy operations at West Lane Works in Southowram, HX3 9TW, with large hardstanding and shed roof area over stone and concrete production. These are process sites where most of what an array generates is consumed behind the meter rather than exported.
The second shape is Halifax's converted-mill inheritance. Dean Clough is a 22-acre former Crossley carpet-mill complex, once the largest carpet maker in the world, now a business and arts hub of more than 100 organisations and around 3,000 people across 16 Victorian mill buildings, with Covéa Insurance at A–B Mills, HX3 5AX, alongside Lloyds Banking Group and NHS occupiers. That heritage stone-and-timber roofscape, repeated across the town's textile and machine-tool mills, is where a structural and loading survey matters as much as the electrical design, because the original decks were never built with a ballasted array in mind and the coverings can be fragile or of heritage value. The roof area is usually there; whether it can carry an array, and how, is settled by survey first.
The third strand is the institutional and light-industrial base. Calderdale Royal Hospital at Salterhebble, run by Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust, is a major weekday energy user with extensive roof and car-park area, the steady profile where self-consumption does most of the work. Around it sit the smaller engineering and warehouse units on estates towards Elland, Brighouse and Sowerby Bridge, many about four miles from the M62 at junctions 24 and 25 along the A629 and A641 corridors. None of these firms are our clients, and we make no claim that they are; they describe the type of site and the load shapes Halifax is built on, which is the ground our design work stands on. We size to the actual building's metered demand, whether that is an Albion Mills production roof or a sub-divided unit in a Dean Clough mill.
Every Halifax design starts with an on-site survey rather than a satellite guess. Our in-house drone pilot, insured and qualified to A2 CofC and GVC standard, flies a 3D survey of the roof, capturing pitch, orientation, shading, parapets and the true usable area. On the town's converted-mill stock that matters, because the drone reads the condition of older heritage coverings without anyone walking a fragile roof to find out. That model feeds a PV*SOL simulation run against your half-hourly load, so the array is sized to what the building actually uses and the layout is only fixed once the roof, its loading and any structural limits are accounted for.
The survey travels to Halifax exactly as it does anywhere in Yorkshire. Whether the roof is a single manufacturing shed at Albion Mills, a row of sub-divided units in a Dean Clough mill or an institutional roof at Salterhebble, the pilot comes to you and the design is built from what the drone records on the day.
The distribution network operator for Halifax is Northern Powergrid, and any commercial system over 50 kWp connects under a G99 application to them. G99 is the engineering approval that lets a generator of this size run in parallel with the grid, and it governs how much you are permitted to export. We prepare and manage that application and the technical correspondence as part of the project, rather than handing it to you.
We do not assert a town-wide constraint for Halifax, because there is no named constrained primary here and we will not invent one. The valley topography means many sites sit on local feeders whose headroom is best confirmed for the actual point of connection rather than assumed, so we check capacity with Northern Powergrid for your postcode and design the connection around what they offer. On a manufacturing or institutional site with a heavy, self-consumed daytime load, much of the generation never leaves the building, which often makes the export side of the G99 position more straightforward than the headline kWp suggests. Where an export limit is needed, we design to it from the start, with export limitation and, where it helps the case, battery storage to hold surplus on site.
The Calderdale valley already carries a fair stock of FiT-era commercial arrays, much of it fitted to mill roofs and industrial-estate units through the Feed-in Tariff years and now a decade or more into service. A good number lost their original installer along the way and have run without proper support since. Through our sister operation Solar Tech Support we take on independent, brand-agnostic operation and maintenance and the takeover of those systems, regardless of who built them or which panels and inverters are on the roof, covering monitoring, fault-finding and repair so an older asset keeps earning.
This is ongoing O&M offered honestly, without a fixed promise we cannot back with a local track record yet. We will not publish a response-time SLA we have not agreed with you for Halifax specifically. What we will do is assess the system on site, tell you plainly what it is producing against what it should, and set out a maintenance scope that fits the building, so a neglected array on a Southowram or Sowerby Bridge roof, or in a sub-let Dean Clough mill, keeps performing rather than quietly degrading.
How the team engineers rooftop solar for a football stadium, matching a large venue roof to an event-driven match-day load. A representative example of the team’s stadium work.
Read the case studyA representative large flat-roof distribution-centre array designed to a daytime logistics load, using half-hourly modelling, an in-house drone survey and an export-limited G99 design to maximise self-consumption.
Read the case studyLast updated June 2026
Not yet, and we say so openly. We are a Yorkshire-based commercial installer covering Halifax and the wider Calderdale valley, but we will not claim a local track record we do not have. What we offer is the engineering a system over 50 kWp needs: an in-house drone survey of your roof, a PV*SOL model built against your half-hourly load, a design to BS 7671 and a G99 connection to Northern Powergrid.
Often it can, but the roof decides, and on a converted carpet or textile mill that is the first thing we check. Stone-and-timber mill structures can carry lower loading than a modern shed, and the covering may be fragile or of heritage value, as across much of the Dean Clough stock. Our drone survey reads the roof in 3D without anyone walking it, and a structural assessment confirms what it can safely carry before any array is sized or specified.
Northern Powergrid is the distribution network operator for Halifax, and a system over 50 kWp connects under a G99 application to them, which we prepare and manage. We do not claim a town-wide constraint here; available capacity is confirmed for your specific point of connection. On a manufacturing or institutional site with a heavy self-consumed daytime load, much of the generation stays behind the meter, which often eases the export position.
Yes. Through Solar Tech Support we provide independent, brand-agnostic operation and maintenance and take over older systems, including FiT-era arrays on Halifax mill and industrial-estate roofs whose original installer has moved on. We assess the system on site first, tell you honestly what condition it is in, and agree a maintenance scope against what we find rather than quoting a fixed SLA up front.
We do not quote a per-kWp or from-price for Halifax, because the honest figure comes from the survey and the PV*SOL model rather than a rate card. A system over 50 kWp is priced around the actual building: the roof's pitch, orientation, usable area and structural loading from the drone survey, your half-hourly demand, the inverter and mounting specification, and the G99 connection terms Northern Powergrid offers for your point of connection. A converted Dean Clough mill bay and a single-pitch manufacturing shed of the same nominal kWp can land at very different costs once loading and access are accounted for, which is why we model before we price. The approach is the same here as anywhere we cover in Yorkshire, and only the building changes the number.
Reaching a Halifax site is straightforward. We are Yorkshire-based and the drone survey travels to Calderdale as part of normal coverage, so a site visit is usually arranged within days rather than weeks, and there is no travel premium in the figure. The overall programme, though, is set by the G99 connection rather than by how far we drive. Once the survey and PV*SOL model are done and the design is agreed, the pace is governed by Northern Powergrid's G99 assessment and any export-limitation or reinforcement terms they return for your point of connection. We prepare and manage that application, but the part worth planning around is the DNO's timescale rather than our travel time to the valley.
Wherever you are in the region, the on-site drone survey comes to you and the PV*SOL model sets the figure. Send us the site and the half-hourly load, and we will come back with a designed system.
