Alectrona
Commercial solar by areaYorkshire-based and quick to your site across Hull and the Humber, designing and maintaining commercial solar above 50 kWp on the city's dockside, cold-storage and business-park roofs.
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.
Alectrona is the commercial arm of RVTC LTD, working UK-wide on rooftop solar above 50 kWp. We are based in Yorkshire and reach Hull and the wider Humber quickly, covering the HU1 to HU5, HU7 and HU9 districts and the surrounding towns of Hessle, Brough, Beverley and Goole. We have not yet installed in Hull, so this page is about coverage, engineering capability and the on-site survey, not a local track record we do not have.
A system at this scale earns the engineering behind it. Above 50 kWp you are outside the domestic MCS route, into territory where structural loading, single-line electrical design, half-hourly load matching and a Distribution Network Operator application all decide whether the array pays back. We treat each of those as design work in its own right, which is why every project starts with a measured survey rather than a desktop estimate.
Hull's commercial roof stock is shaped by the port. The ABP Humber estate around King George Dock and Alexandra Dock is a run of dockside warehousing, container-handling sheds and cold-storage terminals, large flat or low-pitch roofs sitting over operations that draw power around the clock. The refrigerated terminals are the standout. Cold stores and the seafood-processing plants that Hull is known for run a near-constant compressor load through the working day, and that flat daytime demand is exactly the load shape rooftop solar matches best, with most of the generation consumed on site rather than exported.
Beyond the docks, the picture is mixed and worth taking on its own terms. The Siemens Gamesa wind-turbine factory at Paull and the BAE Systems works at Brough are large manufacturing roofs that describe the kind of industrial occupier the area carries; they are context for the local economy, not customers of ours. The Priory Park and Kingswood business and retail parks add flat-roof retail and office stock, where the load is lighter and more daytime-led, so the sizing logic is about trimming the peak rather than covering a continuous baseload. Each of those roof types wants a different array, which is the point of modelling them individually.
The other Hull-specific factor is the coast. A roof a short distance from a working estuary sits in a salt-laden atmosphere, and that affects fixing specification, module selection and the cleaning regime over the system's life. We design for it from the start and account for it in the maintenance plan.
Our in-house drone pilot is fully insured and holds the A2 Certificate of Competency and the GVC, and flies a 3D survey of your roof on site in Hull exactly as anywhere else we work. The survey feeds a PV*SOL model that sizes the array against your half-hourly consumption data, so the design reflects the building's real load and roof geometry rather than a generic yield assumption. It is the same on-site method on a King George Dock cold store as on a Kingswood retail unit.
Hull and the Humber sit in Northern Powergrid's territory; the city has its own Hull District network, a separate legacy grid, but the operator and the application route are the same as everywhere else we work. Any system above the relevant threshold connects under a G99 application to Northern Powergrid, and we prepare and manage that application as part of the design. The Hull commercial grid is generally well served, with reasonable export headroom for mid-sized systems, so the connection position here is usually less constrained than on the more loaded West Yorkshire primaries.
Even so, the connection position is something we confirm for your specific site rather than assume. Where export headroom is tight, a G100 export-limitation scheme keeps the system within what the network will accept while still letting you self-consume the full generation, which on a high-refrigeration dockside load is most of it anyway.
Hull is one of the strongest areas in East Yorkshire for independent operations and maintenance, because a lot of commercial roofs here already carry solar that has aged past its original installer. We take over and maintain existing systems regardless of who fitted them or what brand is on the wall, working through our sister operation Solar Tech Support. That covers monitoring, fault diagnosis, inverter and string repair, and the takeover of older FiT-era arrays whose performance has drifted without anyone watching it.
The coastal setting gives Hull maintenance a particular shape. Salt deposition on dockside and estuary-side roofs builds soiling faster than an inland site, so a scheduled annual clean and inspection is a genuine performance measure here, not a token visit. We set the maintenance plan to the site rather than quoting a generic service level, and we will tell you honestly what a system needs and what it does not.
The page above leads on the ABP dock estate, but a great deal of Hull's usable commercial roof area sits inland on the city's general industrial estates, and these are often the more straightforward sites to design for. Sutton Fields, off Leads Road and Stockholm Road in the HU7 district, is one of the largest industrial estates in the region, a dense grid of manufacturing, trade-counter, warehousing and distribution units with the broad steel-portal roofs that take a clean panel layout and a predictable structural read. The Hedon Road corridor in HU9, running east from the city towards the docks, carries a further run of warehousing and engineering units tied to the port economy. To the west, the National Avenue and Wiltshire Road estates and the English Street area near the river hold older industrial and trade stock of mixed age and roof type.
Each of those estates carries its own demand shape, from a single-shift trade unit to a continuous manufacturing or chilled-storage load, which is why we model the actual half-hourly consumption for a building rather than working from a single Hull template. For an occupier weighing up the engineering, the design and delivery process is the same on a Sutton Fields shed as on a dockside cold store, and the warehousing and logistics load profile is the one that most of this inland stock fits. These firms and estates describe the local building stock rather than a customer list of ours, and we make no claim of a local track record we do not yet hold.
Hull sits at the centre of what is often called the energy estuary, and the policy backdrop genuinely shapes the roof stock coming forward. Hull and the wider Humber form part of the Humber Freeport, designated in 2023, whose tax and customs sites are bringing forward new industrial and low-carbon manufacturing floorspace alongside the established Green Port investment around Alexandra Dock. New employment buildings put up under that programme tend to arrive with the broad, regular roofs that suit a substantial array, and a number are specified photovoltaic-ready from the outset, so a roof draw and a load model can be set against a building that was designed with generation in mind.
The institutional estate is the other strand the dock-led picture can miss. The University of Hull runs a large single-campus estate on the north side of the city in the HU6 area with its own decarbonisation commitments, and the city's NHS, council and education buildings carry steady weekday daytime loads that suit self-consumption. None of these are clients of ours. They matter here because Hull is a low-lying city on reclaimed estuary land, so flood risk and ground conditions can influence where a ground-mount array or its substation can sensibly sit, which is one more reason the commercial guides and an on-site survey settle the design rather than a desktop estimate. We confirm the planning and flood context for the actual site as part of the work.
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. We are Yorkshire-based and cover Hull and the Humber, but we have not installed in the city to date, so we will not claim a local track record we do not have. What we bring is the engineering capability for systems above 50 kWp and an on-site drone survey that comes to your roof like anywhere else we work.
Refrigerated terminals and seafood-processing plants run a near-constant compressor load through the working day. That flat daytime demand matches solar generation closely, so most of the output is consumed on site rather than exported, which is where the strongest return on a commercial system comes from. We confirm the fit by modelling the array against your half-hourly data.
Hull and the Humber are served by Northern Powergrid, through the city's own Hull District legacy network. A commercial system connects under a G99 application that we prepare and manage. The Hull commercial grid is generally well served, with reasonable export headroom; where it is tight, a G100 export-limitation scheme keeps the system within the network's limits while you still self-consume the generation.
Yes. Through Solar Tech Support we take over and maintain existing commercial systems brand-agnostically, including older FiT-era arrays, with monitoring, fault diagnosis and repair. On Hull's coastal roofs we plan a scheduled annual clean and inspection, because salt-driven soiling builds faster near the estuary than inland.
There is no Hull price or per-roof rate we can honestly publish, because the figure comes from the survey and the PV*SOL model rather than a from-price or a per-mile charge. A system over 50 kWp is engineered to your building, so the cost follows the roof area and structure the drone survey records, the panel and inverter specification, the half-hourly load it is sized against, and the G99 connection and any export-limitation work the Northern Powergrid position calls for. A dockside cold store, a Sutton Fields trade unit and a University-area institutional roof can all reach very different numbers for the same headline kilowatts. We survey, model and price the actual site, and we cost it the same way in Hull as anywhere in Yorkshire.
Quickly. We are Yorkshire-based and reach Hull and the Humber as part of our normal coverage, so the in-house drone survey comes to you rather than being treated as a special trip, and there is no travel premium in the figure. The longer pole in the programme is almost never the distance to site. For a system over 50 kWp the timeline is set by the G99 connection process with Northern Powergrid, including any studies on the Hull District network and any export-limitation engineering, alongside the structural and electrical design. We give you a realistic programme for your specific site once the survey and the connection position are known, rather than a fixed date we cannot stand behind.
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.
