Alectrona
Commercial solar by areaYorkshire-based and quick to reach Scarborough for commercial solar over 50 kWp, from the Eastfield food and engineering plants to the Business Park and the resort. We have not installed in the town yet, so we lead with the on-site drone survey and a load-matched design, not a local job count we cannot evidence.
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, designing and delivering rooftop and ground-mount solar over 50 kWp across Scarborough and the North Yorkshire coast. We work the YO11 and YO12 districts through the town and out to the Eastfield and Cayton Low Road corridor, with coverage of the wider coast around Filey, Whitby, Bridlington and the Malton and Pickering hinterland. We are honest up front: we hold no completed installs in Scarborough, so this page is about coverage, the engineering a system this size needs, and the survey we run before any design is drawn.
Scarborough is a coastal resort, but its commercial roof stock is carried as much by manufacturing and food processing as by the visitor economy, and the two have very different load shapes. A system over 50 kWp sits outside the domestic schemes, so it is run as a proper engineering project: an on-site drone survey, a PV*SOL model built against your half-hourly consumption, a design to BS 7671 and 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 figure read off a roof area.
Scarborough's strongest commercial solar roofs are not in the resort core but four miles south-west at Eastfield, just off the A64. Scarborough Business Park sits on a serviced site of more than sixty acres opened up by Caddick Developments with North Yorkshire Council, and the wider Eastfield corridor holds the town's heaviest electrical loads. McCain Foods runs its UK headquarters and a large potato-processing factory here at Havers Hill, a site it has operated since 1969 and won approval to expand with a circa £100 million investment in 2017. A food plant of that kind draws a continuous frying, freezing and packing load through the working day, and that flat daytime demand is the load shape rooftop solar matches best, with most of the generation consumed on site rather than exported. Food processing on this scale is one of the strongest self-consumption cases on the whole coast.
The same corridor carries a genuine engineering base. Plaxton, now part of Alexander Dennis, was founded in the town in 1907 and has built coaches and buses here for over a century, and its large factory-shed roofscape at Cayton Low Road is the kind of broad, lightly-shaded structure a sizeable array suits. Schneider Electric runs a recently built engineering plant on Cayton Low Road and Unison, the all-electric tube-bending machinery maker, sits nearby on Thornburgh Road, both process and assembly occupiers in the Eastfield cluster whose steady weekday demand pairs cleanly with daytime generation. We name these firms to describe the local economy and the building stock, not as customers of ours, and we make no claim to have installed for any of them.
The resort core is a different proposition again. The South Bay harbour, the hotels and the holiday and leisure premises along the front carry lighting, catering and HVAC loads that run through trading and event seasons, while the public sector adds steady weekday roofs at Scarborough Hospital, the North Yorkshire Council estate and the long-standing GCHQ station at Irton Moor on the edge of town. The nearby Woodsmith polyhalite mine and its Scarborough-area supply chain round out an economy that is busier than a seaside town first appears. Each of those roof types is modelled on its own metered data, because a frozen-food plant at Eastfield and a seafront hotel want very different sizing decisions.
Every Scarborough design starts with an on-site survey rather than a satellite guess. Our in-house drone pilot, fully insured and qualified to A2 CofC and GVC standard, flies a 3D survey of the roof so the array is laid out against the real structure, pitch, shading and condition rather than a desktop estimate. On the large factory and warehouse membranes around Eastfield and Cayton Low Road that detail changes the layout, and on an older seafront roof it reads the covering without anyone walking it to find out.
That model feeds a PV*SOL simulation run against your half-hourly load, which is what turns a Scarborough roof into a system with a generation and self-consumption figure you can put in front of a board. The survey travels to the coast exactly as it does anywhere in Yorkshire, whether the site is a Business Park unit at Eastfield or a hotel above the South Bay.
The distribution network operator for Scarborough is Northern Powergrid, whose Yorkshire licence covers the YO postcodes, and any system over 50 kWp connects under a G99 application to them rather than the simpler notification used for small domestic installs. We prepare and manage that application and the technical correspondence as part of the project, sizing the array against your supply capacity and metering from the start so the design that goes to the network is the one we expect to build.
Scarborough's position on the network matters here. The town sits at the end of the line: it is the terminus of both the York to Scarborough and the Hull to Scarborough rail routes, which meet at Seamer Junction, and off the A64 the road and grid links are relatively peripheral. That makes the connection position something to confirm early for a larger array rather than assume, and it strengthens the case for a high self-consumption design. Where export headroom is limited, an export limitation scheme lets the system run at full output for on-site use while capping what reaches the network, which on a heavy Eastfield food or engineering load is most of the generation anyway.
A number of commercial roofs across Scarborough and the wider coast already carry solar from the Feed-in Tariff years, much of it fitted between roughly 2012 and 2016 and now well into middle age, with ageing inverters, monitoring that has gone dark and, in plenty of cases, an original installer who has moved on. Through our sister operation Solar Tech Support we provide independent, brand-agnostic operation and maintenance and take over those older systems whoever fitted them and whatever the panels and inverters are.
That covers monitoring and fault response, inverter and string diagnostics, thermographic inspection and cleaning, and an honest read on whether an inherited array is still earning what it should. The coastal setting gives Scarborough O&M a particular shape, because a roof close to a working harbour and the open sea sits in a salt-laden atmosphere that builds soiling faster than an inland site, so a scheduled clean and inspection is a real performance measure here rather than a token visit. We do not publish a fixed response-time promise we cannot yet stand behind for the town; we agree a maintenance scope against the site once we have seen it.
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
Yes. We design and deliver commercial solar over 50 kWp across Scarborough and the North Yorkshire coast, covering the YO11 and YO12 districts and out to Filey, Whitby, Bridlington and the Malton hinterland. We are Yorkshire-based and quick to reach the town. We have not completed an install in Scarborough yet, so we are open that our case rests on coverage, the on-site drone survey and a PV*SOL design rather than a local track record we cannot evidence.
The Eastfield corridor off the A64 holds the town's heaviest daytime loads, from McCain's potato-processing factory to the Plaxton coachbuilding works and the Schneider Electric and Unison engineering occupiers around Scarborough Business Park. Those plants draw a steady, high weekday demand, which is the load shape that gives the strongest self-consumption, because the generation lands in the same hours the site is already paying for power. The return comes from displacing imported units, not from exporting to the grid.
Northern Powergrid is the distribution network operator for Scarborough, and a system over 50 kWp connects under a G99 application that we prepare and manage as part of the project. Scarborough sits at the end of the rail and road network off the A64, so the connection position is worth confirming early for a larger array. Where export headroom is limited, an export limitation scheme lets the system run at full output for self-consumption while capping what reaches the network.
Yes. Through our sister operation Solar Tech Support we provide independent, brand-agnostic operation and maintenance and take over older FiT-era arrays around Scarborough and the wider coast whoever originally installed them. That covers monitoring, fault response, inverter and string repair and cleaning. On coastal roofs near the harbour and open sea we plan a scheduled clean and inspection, because salt-driven soiling builds faster than inland. We agree the scope after seeing the site rather than quoting a fixed SLA up front.
There is no per-site price we can quote before seeing the roof, and we do not work to a from-price or a per-mile rate. The figure for a Scarborough system comes from the survey and the PV*SOL model rather than from a rule of thumb. What sets it is the usable roof area our drone survey measures, the structural read on the deck and frame, your half-hourly load shape, the inverter and mounting design, and the G99 connection terms Northern Powergrid offers for the site. A steady-load Eastfield plant and a seasonal South Bay hotel can carry very different arrays for the same floor area, which is why we model each building on its own metered consumption rather than a Scarborough average. We are open that we have no completed local install to point a price at, so the number we put in front of you is built from your roof and your load, with the self-consumption and payback shown against your own tariff rather than a headline rate.
The survey comes to you. We are Yorkshire-based and reach Scarborough and the wider coast quickly for an on-site visit, so arranging the drone survey across the YO11 and YO12 districts and out to Filey, Whitby, Bridlington and the Malton hinterland is straightforward. The overall programme, though, is set by the G99 connection rather than by travel time. Scarborough sits at the end of the road and rail network off the A64, with the lines meeting at Seamer Junction, so for a larger array the connection position is worth confirming early, and the Northern Powergrid response is usually the longest single item in the timeline. Survey and PV*SOL design move fast once we have your half-hourly data; the connection sets the date. We prepare and manage the G99 application as part of the project and give you a realistic programme against the actual connection position rather than a fixed turnaround we cannot stand behind for the town.
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.
