Distribution and logistics
The M621 sheds through Hunslet and Stourton, and the newer LS25 and LS26 parks towards Garforth and Rothwell off the M1.
Alectrona
Commercial solar by areaCommercial solar in Leeds, York and North Yorkshire
Alectrona works from the LS1 city core, which means a Leeds survey is a diary slot rather than a journey, and a second visit to check one detail is an hour of somebody’s day rather than a day of it. We design, install and maintain solar over 50 kWp on the warehousing, industrial, office, agricultural and institutional roofs across the city, out through the WF belt, and around the arc from York and Selby up through Harrogate, Ripon and Northallerton to the coast at Scarborough. We have not completed an installation anywhere on that ground, and being based in the middle of it does not change that.
- Northern Powergrid, G99 handled for you
- On-site drone survey before any design
- Over 50 kWp, outside MCS
- Postcode coverage LS, WF, YO, HG and DL6 to DL7 districts
- Local network Northern Powergrid
- Operating base Leeds LS1
This is the page for the city we work out of. Our operating base is in the LS1 core, a few minutes from the Aire Valley industrial belt and inside half an hour of almost every commercial roof in the district. On a project above 50 kWp the distance between the designer and the building quietly decides a lot: how quickly the first survey happens, how many times somebody comes back to check a detail rather than guess at it, and whether the person who drew the array is on the roof when it is commissioned.
It decides nothing about track record. We have not completed an installation in Leeds, and proximity is not a substitute for one. What this page sets out is the mechanical side of the work: when a surveyor can be on your roof, who lodges the connection application, what happens if the roof and the electricity bill belong to different parties, and who turns up in the first summer. It also carries the coverage of the retired Wakefield and Castleford pages, and of the York and North Yorkshire pages, all of which sit in the same working day as the Aire Valley.
We model your roof in 3D, before we quote.
Every design starts on the roof rather than on a satellite image. Our drone pilot is in-house, insured and qualified to A2 CofC and GVC standard, and flies the building to produce a measured 3D model of the real surface: the parapets, the plant decks, the rooflight runs, the shading from a taller neighbour at the hour it actually matters, and the usable area once all of that is taken out.
That model feeds a PV*SOL simulation run against your half-hourly load, which is what turns a roof area into a system with a generation figure, a self-consumption figure and an export position you can put in front of a board. Being twenty minutes away means the pilot can fly on a day that suits your operation rather than one that suits a travel schedule, and can come back if the first flight raises a question worth answering properly.
What a Leeds base changes, and what it does not
Start with the honest half. Being based in the city buys us no Leeds installations, no local reference site and no reason for you to trust us more than a firm from Manchester or Newcastle. There is no completed job here to point at, and a page that implied one would be the first thing worth distrusting on it.
What proximity changes is the cost of attention. A survey in the Aire Valley is a diary slot, not a trip, so it can normally be offered inside days rather than fitted into a run of northern visits. Revisits stop being an event. On a large commercial roof there is always a second question after the first visit, usually about the intake position, a cable route through an occupied unit, a plant deck nobody mentioned, or whether a rooflight run is original or a later repair. At two hours each way those questions get answered on the phone with a photograph. At twenty minutes they get answered by somebody standing there, and the drawing is right the first time.
The same applies at the other end. It matters more that the engineer who modelled the array is present when it energises than that the site is close, but the second is what makes the first practical, and the same goes for the first-summer visit that nobody diarises and everybody needs.
Proximity changes none of the things people hope it changes. It does not shorten the connection timetable, which belongs to the network operator. It does not move the price, because there is no travel line to remove and no per-mile rate to begin with. It does not make a roof carry an array it cannot carry. Treat a local base as a delivery advantage and nothing more, because that is all it honestly is.
Where the roofs are, from the M621 ring to the LS25 parks
Leeds keeps its large commercial roofs in a fairly tight arc, which is the reason a working radius means anything here. Most of them sit inside the Aire Valley, the roughly 1,300 hectares either side of the river running south-east from the city centre out to the M1, covered by its own area action plan and carrying the enterprise-zone designation. Cross Green, Hunslet, Stourton and Temple Green form one of the largest continuous industrial areas in the region, and the roofs there are the broad, lightly shaded planes an array is easiest to design on. The M621 threads through the middle of it, which is why the same run of road serves a distribution shed, a sub-divided engineering estate and an office floorplate within a couple of junctions.
Outside that arc the stock changes character rather than scale. LS25 and LS26 carry the newer distribution parks towards Garforth and Rothwell, including the schemes around Skelton Lake and the logistics park off the M1, where the buildings are recent, the roofs are simple and the electrical intake is usually where the drawings say it is. West of the city, the M62 junctions around Tingley and Gildersome pick up a second belt of distribution and trade-counter units, and the M1 corridor from junction 44 to junction 47 links the two.
The city core is a different job again. Holbeck and the South Bank hold office floorplates whose lighting, ventilation and IT load runs straight through the hours an array generates in, and LS1 adds the older commercial stock above the retail core. Then there is the institutional estate, which is the best-matched roof stock in the district and the least often surveyed: the University of Leeds campus, the city’s NHS acute hospital sites, and the ground-side buildings at Leeds Bradford Airport. Those carry steady weekday demand on sizeable roofs, and they come with procurement routes and access constraints worth understanding before a survey rather than after it.
Very little of this is agricultural. Leeds is an urban district, and the genuine farm-scale enquiries come from the Vale of York, the Selby plain and the country between the market towns, which the North Yorkshire section below covers.
Multi-occupier industrial
Sub-divided engineering stock at Cross Green, Temple Green, Kirkstall and Armley Road, where one building is several roofs and several meters.
Offices and mixed commercial
Holbeck, the South Bank and the LS1 core, where the roof is usually landlord-owned and the load is usually the tenant’s.
Public sector and institutional
The University of Leeds, the city’s NHS acute hospital estate and the ground-side buildings at Leeds Bradford Airport.
Market town and rural stock
Estates at Clifton Moor, Hornbeam Park, Melmerby, Sherburn-in-Elmet and Leeming Bar, with the Vale of York grain and crop stores between them.
Who owns the roof and who pays the electricity bill
More Leeds projects stall on this than on anything technical. A large share of the city’s industrial stock is multi-let, and a large share of the office stock is investor-owned, so the roof, the supply and the electricity bill routinely sit with three different parties. Until that is untangled there is nothing to design, because the answer changes who applies for the connection, who owns the array, who insures it and who benefits from the generation.
Three shapes cover most of it. The owner-occupier is the simple case: one party holds the building, the supply and the decision. The tenant on a full repairing lease with a landlord-owned roof is the common case, and there the tenant pays the bill and therefore captures the value, but cannot touch the roof without a licence to alter, so the array is usually tenant-owned under a licence with agreed reinstatement terms. The landlord with tenant-paid supplies is the awkward case, because the party who can authorise the work is not the party who saves anything, and the route through is normally a landlord-owned array selling to the occupier, a rent or service-charge mechanism, or a roof let to a third party.
None of that is exotic, but it needs the right people in one room, and it is the single thing a local base helps with most. Getting a managing agent, an occupier’s engineering manager and a landlord’s surveyor to the same table for an hour is a meeting rather than a trip, and it usually settles in that hour what six weeks of correspondence will not. Sequencing it is our work, not a problem to hand back. Our offices and landlords page sets out the split-incentive routes. Where the party that captures the saving can also fund the array, buying it outright keeps the asset, the allowances and the return with them, and it is the route we recommend wherever the capital is there; the funder-owned routes cover the case where the roof owner would rather let the space than fund an array.
Designing to an export limit from the first drawing
Northern Powergrid is the network operator for every town on this page, and anything above 50 kWp connects under a G99 application to them. Leeds primary substations are commonly constrained, so an export limitation applied as a G100 device is the normal outcome here rather than the exception. That is a reason to start the application in the same week as the survey, not a reason to install less. Out in the North Yorkshire arc the same conclusion arrives by a different route, because a long rural circuit runs into the statutory voltage limits well before the cable runs out of capacity, so the export figure offered can sit a long way below what the roof would carry. Either way the enquiry goes in before the layout is drawn.
Treat the export limit as a design input rather than a disappointment and most of the difficulty goes out of a Leeds connection. A limited system is not a smaller system. It is a system that has been told what it may push back into the network, which for a building with a solid weekday load is a constraint on the least valuable few per cent of its output. The units you avoid importing are worth more than the units you would have exported, so a design aimed at self-consumption is usually the one you wanted anyway.
In practice that means the limitation scheme is chosen at the same time as the inverter, not bolted on after an unwelcome letter. A G100 arrangement needs a metering point, a controller and a communications path decided early, and retrofitting one into a finished design is how a commissioning date slips. We size the array against twelve months of half-hourly consumption, then read the shape of the year rather than the total: the summer weekends, the shutdown weeks, the Christmas fortnight when a warehouse is dark and an unlimited array would be exporting hard into a constrained primary.
The sequence we run is straightforward. Half-hourly data and the connection application go in early and run alongside the design rather than after it, so the network assessment and the drawings arrive at roughly the same time. The design is drawn so that either answer is buildable, which stops a project waiting on a letter to know its own shape. We handle the application and the correspondence rather than leaving it with your team. Our guides on the G99 application and G100 export limitation set out what each stage asks for.
- G99 The application every system above 50 kWp needs lodged and corresponded on by us, not left with your team
- G100 The export-limitation arrangement Leeds primaries commonly require chosen with the inverter, not bolted on after the letter
- Half-hourly The consumption data the design is sized against twelve months of it, read for shape as well as total
Monitoring, snagging and the first summer
Handover is where commercial arrays quietly begin to underperform, and almost none of it is dramatic. A monitoring portal is set up in the installer’s name and never transferred. An alert address belongs to somebody who has since left. A string is commissioned in February, reads plausibly against a low winter baseline, and is not looked at again until an annual figure comes in twelve per cent under the model. The failure mode is not a fault, it is nobody reading anything.
So the first twelve months are treated as part of the job rather than as aftercare. The monitoring is registered to you and not to us, with alerts going to a named person on your side and a second address that survives them leaving. The snag list is closed on site rather than by email, which is the part proximity genuinely helps with. There is a visit in the first strong-sun weeks, when the array is finally seeing the irradiance the model assumed and any weak connection, mismatched string or shading the survey underrated becomes visible. And there is a look at the first shutdown period, because a site that goes dark for a fortnight tells you more about the export position than any summer weekday.
None of that is a service-level promise, and we will not print one we have not agreed with you for a specific site. It is what a first year should contain, and it is the reason we would rather work on roofs we can reach in an hour than on roofs we can reach in four.
Taking over a system somebody else installed
There is a large population of commercial arrays across Leeds and the WF belt that went up during the Feed-in Tariff years and are now a decade or more into a twenty-five-year life. A good number have lost their original installer, and with them the monitoring login, the string layout drawing, the commissioning certificates and any idea of what the system is supposed to produce. The building is still generating something. Nobody can say whether it is generating what it should.
A takeover starts by rebuilding that picture rather than by quoting for a service contract. We gather whatever documentation survives and recreate the rest from the site: inverter fault and yield history, string tests, insulation resistance, the isolation and labelling position, the condition of the mounting and containment, and a read of actual output against what the array ought to produce for its size and orientation. That gives you one number worth acting on, the gap between what it is doing and what it should be doing, and a short list of what stands between the two.
The work is brand-agnostic and runs through our sister operation, Solar Tech Support, so the diagnostic side is done by people who do it daily whatever badge is on the inverter. Ongoing maintenance is a relationship of small visits rather than large ones, and small visits are precisely the thing that stops happening when the maintainer is two hours away. Our system takeover and independent audit pages set out the scope of each.
Wakefield, Castleford and the Five Towns
Wakefield district used to have its own pages on this site and now sits here, which is a coverage decision rather than a downgrade. The reason is the operating argument the rest of this page makes: the WF belt is inside the same working day as the Aire Valley. Stourton to junction 31 of the M62 is a short run down the M1 and across, and Castleford, Normanton and Glasshoughton sit on the same corridor. A morning survey in Hunslet and an afternoon one at Europort is an ordinary day, which is what makes revisits and first-summer checks as practical there as they are in the city.
Two things change across the boundary. The planning authority is Wakefield Council rather than Leeds City Council, so the determination route and the pre-application contact differ even where the building type is identical. The network operator does not change, so the connection is handled exactly as it is in Leeds. Below, each town carries its own postcode districts, its authority and the detail of what is on its roofs.
York, the market towns and the country between them
North and east of the city the coverage opens out into an arc: York and the Vale, Selby and the plain below it, Harrogate and Knaresborough, Ripon and lower Wensleydale, Northallerton and Leeming Bar, and Scarborough at the far end of the A64. They used to hold two pages of their own and now sit here, for the same reason the WF belt does. Every one of them is a same-day return from the base, with hours on the roof in between, so the survey, the revisit and the commissioning attendance work there as they do in Hunslet.
What changes across that arc is the constraint, and it changes twice. In York the question is consent before it is anything else, because the walls, the listings, the conservation areas and a tight green belt decide what is possible before the engineering starts, and the consentable commercial roofscape is a ring on and outside the A1237 rather than the historic core. Our planning permission guide sets out how that route runs and where it stops.
Everywhere else in the arc consent on an existing agricultural or industrial building is usually straightforward, and the connection decides the size of the system instead. Much of that country is fed by long overhead circuits and small transformers, so the export figure the network offers is frequently a fraction of what the roof could carry, and a layout drawn before that figure is known is a layout that gets redrawn. The useful first question there is not how much roof there is. It is how much the feeder will take and how much the building itself can absorb, which is why the connection enquiry goes in before the layout on any rural site. Our G100 export limitation guide covers what to do when the offer comes back below the roof.
Two more things vary enough to be worth naming before a visit is booked. The determining authority is North Yorkshire Council across most of the arc, City of York Council inside the York boundary, and a national park authority inside the Yorkshire Dales or North York Moors boundaries, which a site a few miles from Skipton or Scarborough can easily be. And the ground matters on some of it in a way it does not in Leeds: the gypsum beneath Ripon, and the recorded workings under the old Selby coalfield, are rooftop non-issues and real ground-mount questions.
Booking a survey in Leeds
A survey is a conversation and then a date. The conversation establishes the building, who holds the roof, who pays the supply and roughly what the site does through the week, which is enough to know whether a system above 50 kWp is the right question at all. If it is not, we say so at that point rather than after a visit.
Four things make the visit worth more. Twelve months of half-hourly consumption data, which your supplier will provide on request and which sets the sizing. The MPAN for the supply. Any roof plan or as-built drawing, however old. And a name for site access, because on a live industrial unit the constraint is usually operational rather than technical. None are required to book, but a survey that arrives with them produces a model rather than a range.
The visit takes a few hours on most buildings, and what comes back afterwards is a PV*SOL model against your own consumption, a position on export and limitation, and a costed design the survey supports. There is no obligation attached to any of it, and a site in the WF belt is booked on exactly the same terms.
Leeds and the towns around it
Leeds
The commercial roof stock runs district by district in a way that is worth knowing before a first visit. LS9 covers Cross Green and Burmantofts through to the Temple Green estates, the older engineering sheds now sub-divided into multi-let units, so one building can be several roofs and several meters. LS10 holds Hunslet and the Stourton corridor at the M621 and M1 junction, which is the densest run of distribution roofs in the city. LS11 is Holbeck and the South Bank, where the roof is usually landlord-owned and the load is usually the tenant’s. LS12 takes in Armley Road and the Kirkstall corridor, a mixed industrial belt close enough to the centre that access rather than roof area tends to be the design constraint.
Further out, LS25 reaches Garforth and the newer distribution parks off the M1, and LS26 covers Rothwell and the southern edge of the Aire Valley towards Stourton. LS1 is the city core itself, offices and mixed commercial above the retail centre, where a rooftop array competes with plant for the same limited flat area. Leeds City Council is the determining authority across all of them, and the Aire Valley area action plan and the enterprise-zone designation give the industrial belt a policy backdrop that is broadly supportive of on-site generation. All of it sits within about half an hour of the base, so the survey, the follow-up visit and the commissioning attendance are ordinary appointments rather than expeditions.
Wakefield
Wakefield’s commercial roofs are strung along the motorway rather than gathered round the city. WF1 and WF2 hold the city core and the Calder Park estates to the south-west, WF3 runs up through Lofthouse and Tingley towards the M62 junctions where the district meets the Leeds boundary, WF4 covers Durkar and Crigglestone on the southern side, and WF6 is Normanton, where Trinity Park and the approach to Wakefield Europort sit off junction 31 of the M62. Europort is the anchor: a rail-connected intermodal estate whose warehousing carries the lighting, conveyor, charging and refrigeration load that runs through the working day, which is the demand shape that lets generation be used on site rather than pushed at the network.
Underneath the logistics sits the coalfield inheritance. The district’s post-war factory stock left a spread of low-pitch and flat-roofed units across Normanton, Altofts and the WF core, buildings whose roofs are broad and whose electrical intakes are frequently older than anything else on site. Wakefield also carries a substantial public estate, including an acute hospital at Pinderfields alongside council buildings, leisure centres, schools and colleges, all of them running steady weekday demand in the hours an array generates.
Wakefield Council determines here rather than Leeds City Council, and the adopted local plan pushes employment land and low-carbon development along the M1 and M62 corridors, which is the same belt the large roofs occupy. We have not installed in the district, and the sites named above describe the building stock rather than any client list.
Castleford
Castleford has rebuilt its industrial base once already, and the roofs record both versions. The town grew on glass, and the country’s first semi-automatic bottle machine was installed here in 1887, with bottle production running into the early 1980s alongside chemicals, liquorice and confectionery and the collieries. What that left is a stock of substantial flat and low-pitch factory roofs across the WF10 trading estates, including the apparel works on Albion Street, sitting over buildings whose electrical infrastructure has usually been re-fitted several times.
The current economy is on top of it. Whistler Drive in WF10 carries sterile-liquid pharmaceutical manufacturing with a commercial headquarters and a logistics centre attached, which is a process and distribution roof with a steady daytime draw. West towards Normanton, the newer cross-dock warehousing off California Drive was built to a net-zero carbon and BREEAM Excellent standard with EV charging and a roof designed from the outset to take photovoltaics, which is a useful signal of where the local building type is heading. South of the town at Glasshoughton, off the A639 near junction 32 of the M62, the outlet shopping village on Tomahawk Trail and the neighbouring indoor snow-sports and leisure complex give large-format retail and leisure floorplates with constant lighting and ventilation demand, served by their own station on the line through to Leeds, Wakefield and Sheffield.
WF11 only counts in part: it is mainly Knottingley and Ferrybridge, with its western fringe touching the Castleford area, and Allerton Bywater sits to the north-west. Wakefield Council is the planning authority. We hold no completed jobs in the town, and the sites above are named as local context rather than as customers.
York
York is a single unitary authority covering rather more than the city itself, and its postcode geography tracks the constraint story closely. YO1 is the walled core, where the conservation area and the listings are densest and a consentable commercial roof is the exception rather than the rule. YO31 runs north-east from the walls through Layerthorpe, Heworth and the Haxby Road frontage, mixing protected Victorian stock with working units on the same streets. YO10 covers Fulford, Fishergate and Heslington, and takes in the university campuses and the science park at the eastern edge.
Beyond those the districts get easier, and the consentable commercial roofscape is a ring sitting on or outside the A1237. Clifton Moor to the north is the largest single concentration: light-industrial and trade units off Amy Johnson Way and Kettlestring Lane, retail sheds at Clifton Moor Gate, almost all of it post-1980 steel frame with shallow pitches or flat roofs, none of it in a conservation area and none of it listed. YO30 and YO32 hold that ground along with Rawcliffe, Skelton, Huntington and Monks Cross. YO26 runs west to Poppleton and carries York Business Park at Outgang Lane and Northminster at Upper Poppleton, the widest spans in the city. YO23 and YO24 take in Acomb, Dringhouses, Bishopthorpe and Copmanthorpe, with the racecourse and the Knavesmire stray between them. YO19 covers Dunnington, Murton, Wheldrake and Elvington to the south-east, the most rural part of the authority and the part where green belt and floodplain questions arrive first.
The pattern decides how a project runs. On the ring the constraints answer is short, so the survey and the design carry the programme. Inside the walls that reverses, and what looks like a solar project is really a planning exercise with a solar element attached. The authority boundary is worth settling early too, because addresses that read as York are not always determined by York: Sand Hutton, Stamford Bridge and much of the surrounding YO41 area fall to different authorities, and a site that straddles the line needs that resolved before an application is drafted.
Harrogate
Harrogate is the one place on this arc where the network is rarely the difficulty. It is a substantial town on a firm supply, and its commercial roof stock is unusually weighted towards hospitality: the convention centre and the dense belt of conference hotels around it put large flat roofs over buildings with heavy lighting, catering, air-handling and event loads. That is an event-driven demand curve rather than a shift pattern, strong through the working day and heavier across an exhibition season, and it self-consumes generation well when the diary is full. Sizing against a full year of half-hourly data counts for more here than in most towns, because a quiet February in this trade looks nothing like a busy September.
The straightforward arrays are on the estates. Hornbeam Park sits south of the centre, Cardale Park lies off Beckwith Head Road to the south-west, and further commercial and industrial stock runs through Pannal and the St George's Road corridor towards the A61. Knaresborough adds trade, manufacturing and storage units around Manse Lane and Halfpenny Close. The district also carries pharmaceutical and laboratory occupiers whose process and clean-room loads run continuously, which is the steadiest demand anywhere in the town. The protected Victorian spa and town-centre stock in the middle is why the workable large arrays sit out on those modern estates, and west of the town the ground rises into the Nidderdale National Landscape, where a designation applies that does not apply on the estates. One boundary worth knowing: the Thorp Arch estate on the Wetherby side is often described as Harrogate's eastern fringe and is determined by Leeds City Council rather than by North Yorkshire.
Ripon
Ripon is the smallest city in the county and carries a heavier engineering base than its size suggests. Gritting and salt-spreading vehicles have been built on the edge of the city since 1969, from a purpose-built plant since 1980, and cable-installation engineering has been established here since 1976. Both are assembly operations with steady weekday demand from machinery, compressed air, paint and welding plant and lighting, on large roof and yard footprints. The city has had no railway since the passenger line closed in 1967, so everything moves by road, which is why the commercial weight sits out at Melmerby beside Junction 50 of the A1(M): Ripon Business Park on Melmerby Green Lane, a managed industrial and distribution estate of more than sixty acres, with Barker Business Park alongside it.
Two facts specific to Ripon change the engineering here. The first is underground. The city sits over Permian gypsum, which dissolves in groundwater, and Ripon has one of the best documented histories of ground subsidence and sinkhole formation in the country. That is a rooftop non-issue and a serious ground-mount question: any foundation design on this ground, driven pile or ballast, needs a geotechnical read of the specific parcel rather than a standard detail lifted from another site. The second is landscape. Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal, a short distance south-west, is a World Heritage Site, so a scheme in its setting is assessed from considerably further away than its own boundary implies.
Beyond the city the district runs out into lower Wensleydale, where grain stores, farm buildings and rural enterprises sit on the weak feeders this part of the coverage is largely about, and where the export answer decides the design. The closure of the barracks and the Clotherholme redevelopment, around 1,300 homes with a neighbourhood centre and employment land, will add commercial floorspace built to current standards, which is the easiest kind of roof to design an array onto provided it is in the scheme before the elevations are fixed.
Selby
Selby is the one place on this page where the constraint sits above the feeder rather than on it. The Selby A grid supply point, associated with the large generating connection at Drax a few miles to the south, is reported as one of the more constrained supply points in Yorkshire, which means a larger scheme in this area can be offered terms carrying active network management or curtailment rather than a firm export figure. We flag that as an indicative market report rather than published network data, and we confirm the real position for your own supply with a live connection enquiry before designing to it. What it does mean in practice is that in Selby the enquiry goes in first, without exception.
The roof stock is distribution and processing, and the road network explains it. The A63 bypass, the A19 and Junction 42 of the A1(M) place the district inside a strong catchment for large single-storey sheds. Sherburn Enterprise Park at Sherburn-in-Elmet holds the biggest concentration; the A19 Business Park near Riccall is built on the former colliery ground of the Selby coalfield; and Selby Business Park off Barlby Road, with the older industrial addresses around Vivars Way and Canal Road, carries the town's trade and distribution units. Barlby Road also holds the rail freight terminal on the former mill site, where an agricultural and animal-feed mill has stood since the early 1900s, and the wider Olympia Park scheme is redeveloping that ground as a mixed-use quarter. Around all of it the Vale of York arable and vegetable-storage economy carries on, which is where the seasonal load shapes in this part of the coverage come from.
One boundary note that matters for an application. LS25 straddles the county line: the Garforth end is Leeds City Council, and Sherburn-in-Elmet is North Yorkshire Council. Two units a few miles apart on the same postcode district answer to different planning authorities, so which applies is settled before anything is drafted. Our warehousing and logistics page covers the shed side.
Northallerton
Northallerton is the county town, and the public estate is the largest thing on its roofscape. County Hall, opened in 1906, is the headquarters of North Yorkshire Council and of the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority, and the Friarage Hospital is an acute hospital of 189 beds serving a rural population of roughly 135,000. A hospital draws power around the clock and a county office estate draws it steadily across the working week, and both are demand shapes that consume generation on site instead of pushing it at the network. The town's trade and warehousing sits on Standard Way Industrial Estate and the adjoining Thornfield Business Park in DL6 2, and the Treadmills scheme on the former prison site has added modern retail and leisure roof area in the centre.
The instructive contrast sits a few miles west. Leeming Bar Industrial Estate, on DL7 9 off the A1(M), is a genuine food and drink manufacturing cluster: frozen confectionery on Plews Way, a soft drinks plant and a frozen foods manufacturer, all carrying heavy and close to continuous load. Those plants stand on supplies sized for their own import, while the villages and holdings within the same few miles are on the rural spurs that make export the binding question. Two sites twenty minutes apart in this district can receive completely different answers from the same network, which is exactly why the connection enquiry goes in per site rather than per town.
Northallerton station is on the East Coast Main Line between Thirsk and Darlington, and the A684 and A167 tie the estates into the A1(M) and the A19, so the district's distribution roofs are well placed on the road network even where they are poorly placed on the electrical one. Our public sector page covers how the council and health estates are approached.
Scarborough
Scarborough is the end of the line in a literal sense. The lines from York and from Hull meet at Seamer Junction and stop here, the A64 is the single strategic road in, and the electricity network arrives the same way, from inland. That peripheral position is why a larger array in this town warrants an early connection enquiry rather than an assumption, and why the design leans towards self-consumption from the first drawing rather than as a fallback.
The heavy loads are not on the seafront. Four miles south-west at Eastfield, off the A64, sit the district's largest electrical demands: potato processing on a site at Havers Hill running since 1969, coachbuilding at Cayton Low Road where buses and coaches have been built in the town since 1907, an electrical equipment plant on the same road, and an all-electric tube-bending machinery works on Thornburgh Road. Scarborough Business Park, a serviced site of more than sixty acres brought forward with North Yorkshire Council, sits in the same corridor. Continuous frying, freezing, packing and process load through the working day is the strongest self-consumption case anywhere on this coast.
The resort core is a different load and, unusually for this page, one that runs in phase with the sun. Hotel, harbour and leisure demand peaks in July and August, which is also when the array produces most, so a seafront building's seasonal shape works in its favour where an inland crop store's works against it. A roof this close to open sea is specified for the exposure and the salt rather than to an inland standard, and that is the extent of the difference in the equipment. Inland the YO13 hinterland rises quickly into the North York Moors National Park, so a site only a few miles from the town centre can be determined by the park authority rather than the council. Steady weekday demand is added by the hospital, the council estate and the government signals station at Irton Moor on the edge of town.
Engineering, on real roofs.
- Warehousing & logistics
Flat-roof logistics array
How a large flat-roof distribution-centre array is sized to a daytime logistics load, using half-hourly modelling, an in-house drone survey and an export-limited design.
Read the worked example - Sports venues
Stadium stand roof
How a stadium stand roof is matched to an event-driven load, where the heaviest demand falls in the evening and the load model decides whether storage earns its place.
Read the worked example
Commercial solar in Leeds: common questions
There is no Leeds price list and we will not put a per-kWp or a from-figure on the city, because the same roof area produces very different designs depending on the intake position, the export limit and how the building actually uses power. The figure comes out of the survey and the model: the usable roof the drone measures on the day, twelve months of your half-hourly consumption, the inverter and limitation strategy, and the connection terms for your specific point of supply. Being local removes no cost from that, because there is no travel charge in it to begin with.
Usually within days rather than weeks, because a Leeds survey is a diary slot rather than a journey and does not have to wait for a run of visits in the area to justify itself. The visit takes a few hours on most buildings and produces a drone flight and a measured 3D model of the roof, photographs and measurements of the electrical intake and switchroom, a note of the plant, rooflights, parapets and access routes, and a first read of where an array would and would not go.
If that first flight raises a question deserving a proper answer rather than a guess, we come back. That is a decision which is easy to make at twenty minutes and easy to avoid at two hours.
The connection application goes in for the supply, so it is made in the name of the party holding the MPAN, which on a full repairing lease is normally you as the occupier. We prepare and run that application either way. Ownership of the array is a separate question and is settled commercially rather than technically: because the occupier pays the bill, the occupier usually captures the value and therefore usually funds and owns the system, installed under a licence to alter from the landlord with agreed terms for the roof warranty, insurance and reinstatement.
Where the landlord would rather own the asset, the routes are a landlord-funded array with the output sold to the occupier, a service-charge mechanism, or letting the roof to a third party. We are happy to sit down with the managing agent, your engineering manager and the landlord’s surveyor together, which in this city is a meeting rather than a trip and normally settles in an hour what correspondence will not settle in six weeks.
No, though it changes what the design is aimed at. A system sized hard to self-consumption earns against imported units over the years you are actually in the building, so the sizing question becomes how much of your own daytime load you can cover rather than how much roof you can fill. Reinstatement is dealt with in the licence to alter, and a well-mounted array on a flat roof is designed to be removable, so the end-of-lease position is a cost you can put a number to at the start rather than an unknown.
Two other routes are worth raising early. A lease extension or a break negotiation often sits alongside the solar decision and can be timed with it. Alternatively the landlord takes the asset and the occupier takes the output, which removes the term mismatch entirely.
Yes, and by the same people. Wakefield, Normanton, Castleford and the wider Five Towns are covered from Leeds, and so are York, Harrogate, Knaresborough, Ripon, Selby, Northallerton, Leeming Bar and Scarborough. All of them sit inside the same working day as the Aire Valley, so surveys, revisits and commissioning attendance work there as they do in the city. Their postcode districts, planning authorities and building stock are set out in the covered towns section on this page rather than on separate pages.
The practical differences are about who determines an application and what the constraint turns out to be. Wakefield Council covers the WF belt, City of York Council covers the York boundary, North Yorkshire Council covers the market towns, and a national park authority can determine a site a few miles outside Scarborough. In York the binding constraint is usually consent; across the rural arc it is usually the connection. Skipton has moved to our West Yorkshire page, because it sits at the top of the same Airedale run as Keighley.
Not yet, and we will not imply otherwise on the page for the city we work from. Our operating base is in the LS1 core, which is a genuine fact about how quickly we can be on your roof and how often we can come back, and it is not a track record. What we bring instead is the engineering a system above 50 kWp needs: an on-site drone survey, a design to BS 7671, a PV*SOL model against your own half-hourly load, and a connection application we run rather than hand over. Ask us for that evidence rather than for a local job count we do not have.
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Last updated August 2026
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Tell us where the site is.
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.
- On-site 3D drone survey, fully insured in-house pilot
- We confirm your DNO and handle the G99 connection
- Over 50 kWp, outside MCS
- PV*SOL bankable-grade modelling