Alectrona
Commercial solar by areaYorkshire-based commercial solar for Rotherham's manufacturing, industrial and logistics sites over 50 kWp. We have not installed in Rotherham yet, so we lead with coverage, a full on-site drone survey and a load-matched design.
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.
Rotherham sits at the centre of one of the most energy-intensive commercial economies in Yorkshire, from the research and manufacturing buildings on the Advanced Manufacturing Park to the distribution sheds along the M18. Alectrona is the commercial arm of RVTC LTD, Yorkshire-based and working across South Yorkshire for rooftop and ground-mount solar above 50 kWp. We are quick to reach a Rotherham site, and being honest, we have no completed installs in the town yet, so this page is about what we cover and how we engineer the work, not a local track record.
A system this size is a capital asset on your roof for two decades or more, so it earns the engineering. We model the array in PV*SOL against your own half-hourly load, design to BS 7671 and connect under a G99 application to Northern Powergrid. The aim is a system sized to what the building actually uses through the working day, rather than a headline kWp figure.
Rotherham's commercial roof stock is unusually varied for a town its size, and the load shapes underneath those roofs are what drive the design. The Advanced Manufacturing Park, in a Rotherham postcode, is genuinely one of the highest-tech manufacturing quarters in the UK, home to precision-engineering and research buildings of the kind associated with names like Boeing, McLaren and the AMRC. That class of building carries heavy, steady weekday electrical demand, and a flat daytime base load is close to the ideal case for self-consumption: most of what the array generates is used on site, behind the meter, rather than exported at a low rate.
North of the town, the Manvers and Wath-upon-Dearne industrial corridor and the wider Dearne Valley enterprise zone are built largely on former colliery land, which means large modern single-storey units with broad, lightly pitched or flat roofs that suit a clean panel layout. The Parkgate and Cortonwood retail parks add big-box retail and adjacent logistics roofs whose demand runs through trading and shift hours, again matching the solar curve well. Out at the M18 junctions 1 to 3, the logistics quarter puts large distribution-shed roofs over operations that run refrigeration, conveyors and charging through daylight, with Harworth Estates' land around Maltby on the Rotherham side and the SEGRO iPort park sitting just over the boundary into Doncaster.
Each of those load profiles is different, and that is the point of surveying before quoting. A manufacturing plant drawing a constant load wants a different sizing decision from a retail shed that peaks at midday or a logistics unit ramping for despatch. We model each one on its own metered data rather than assume a single Rotherham template.
Every system starts with an on-site survey, and Rotherham is a short run for us, as anywhere in South Yorkshire is. Our in-house drone pilot, insured and qualified to A2 CofC and GVC, flies a 3D survey of the roof, capturing pitch, orientation, shading and the real usable area. That model feeds the PV*SOL design, so the array you are quoted reflects the actual roof rather than a desk estimate from aerial imagery.
The survey travels to your site whether you are on the AMP, in the Dearne Valley or out by the M18, and it is the same method everywhere: measure the roof properly, model it against your load, then design.
The distribution network operator across Rotherham is Northern Powergrid, and any system above the small-scale threshold connects through a G99 application to them. For a commercial array this is the part of the programme that most often sets the timeline, so we prepare the application properly: the right export position, the protection settings and, where the connection or your own commercial case calls for it, an export limitation scheme so the system can run at full output for self-consumption while capping what reaches the network. We do not assume a specific local constraint for your postcode; we confirm the available capacity with Northern Powergrid for the actual site and design the connection around what they offer.
A good number of Rotherham's commercial roofs already carry solar from the FiT era, much of it installed between roughly 2012 and 2016 and now running on ageing inverters with little or no monitoring. Through Solar Tech Support we offer independent, brand-agnostic operation and maintenance and the takeover of those older systems, whoever installed them. That means fault-finding, inverter and monitoring work, and a clear picture of whether an array is still earning what it should.
We will not quote a fixed response time we cannot stand behind. What we will do is set out a maintenance scope that fits the system and the site, so an existing array on a Manvers unit or an AMP building keeps performing rather than quietly degrading.
Rotherham's industrial geography runs along the River Don, and the Templeborough and Sheffield Road corridor between the town and the Sheffield boundary is its oldest working spine. This is steel country in the literal sense: the melting shops, rolling mills and downstream metals processors that line the Don Valley draw heavy three-phase electrical loads, and the steel and engineering trades have shaped the building stock here for over a century. The roofs reflect that history. Alongside the cleaner steel-portal units you find older, larger-span industrial sheds with steeper pitches, north-light saw-tooth roofs and structural quirks that a desktop estimate from aerial imagery tends to get wrong.
That is exactly the kind of stock where a flown drone survey earns its place: an older mill roof has to be assessed for its real usable area, its load capacity and its shading before a panel layout means anything. The process electricity behind these buildings, the furnaces, compressors and machine tools running through the working day, is also where the self-consumption case is strongest, because the array sits underneath a steady weekday base load rather than feeding a thinly used office. For metals, fabrication and heavy-engineering occupiers across S60 and S61, our commercial manufacturing solar approach starts from the metered process load rather than the floor area.
For most rooftop arrays on a Rotherham commercial building, the local planning authority is Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, and a large share of roof-mounted solar on industrial and commercial premises falls under permitted development rather than a full planning application. That position changes near a listed building, in a conservation area such as the historic core around All Saints' Square and Clifton Park, or where a roof faces a highway in a sensitive setting, so we confirm the planning route for the specific building early rather than assume it. Ground-mount schemes and anything on or near heritage assets are a different conversation, and we flag that during the survey rather than once work is under way.
Rotherham also carries a substantial institutional and public-sector estate: the borough council's own buildings, NHS premises around Rotherham General Hospital, schools and colleges, and leisure and community sites. These tend to run predictable daytime occupancy loads that suit on-site generation well, and they are increasingly procured against carbon and energy-cost targets. We have not delivered a project for any Rotherham institution, and we make no such claim, but the load profiles on that estate are a genuine fit for systems above 50 kWp. Whatever the building, the route from enquiry to energised array follows the same engineered commercial process: survey, PV*SOL model against your half-hourly load, design to BS 7671, then the G99 connection.
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 will not pretend otherwise. We are Yorkshire-based and cover Rotherham and the wider South Yorkshire area for commercial solar over 50 kWp. We lead with our coverage, our in-house drone survey and a PV*SOL design matched to your metered load, rather than any local case study we cannot honestly claim.
Northern Powergrid is the distribution network operator for Rotherham. A commercial system above the small-scale threshold connects through a G99 application to them, and we handle that application as part of the project. Where it suits the connection or your commercial case, an export limitation scheme lets the array run at full output for self-consumption while capping export to the network.
The steady weekday demand on Advanced Manufacturing Park buildings, and the trading and shift-hour demand across the Manvers corridor, the Parkgate and Cortonwood retail parks and the M18 logistics sheds, all line up well with daytime generation. That means a high share of what the array produces is used on site behind the meter rather than exported, which is what makes the economics work at this scale.
Yes. Through Solar Tech Support we provide independent, brand-agnostic operation and maintenance and take over older systems, including FiT-era arrays from around 2012 to 2016 that are now on ageing inverters. We do not advertise a fixed response time we cannot honour; we agree a maintenance scope that fits the system and the site.
We do not quote a per-kWp or a from-price, because at this scale it would be a guess. The figure for a Rotherham building comes from the survey and the PV*SOL model, not a per-mile rate or a headline rate card. What drives it is your roof's real usable area and structure, your half-hourly load and how much of the generation you consume on site, the inverter and any export-limitation or battery strategy, and the G99 connection terms Northern Powergrid offer for that site. A heavy, steady weekday load like the process demand on an AMP building or a Templeborough metals unit usually improves the economics, because more of the output is used behind the meter rather than exported. We survey, model and then put a costed design in front of you, the same approach wherever the site is.
Quickly. We are Yorkshire-based, so Rotherham is a short, ordinary run for us, and the drone survey comes to you whether you are on the Advanced Manufacturing Park, along the Sheffield Road corridor, up at Manvers or out by the M18. The survey is not the part that sets the overall programme. For a system above 50 kWp the timeline is usually governed by the G99 connection application to Northern Powergrid and their assessment of the local network, not by travel distance. We get on site fast, complete the survey and PV*SOL design promptly, and then the connection process largely paces the rest. We will give you a realistic programme for your specific site rather than a fixed promise 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.
