Alectrona
Commercial solar by areaYorkshire-based and quick to your site in York. We design commercial rooftop solar over 50 kWp for the city's food plants, distribution units and retail parks, and we are honest that our completed installs are not yet in York itself.
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 designs and delivers commercial rooftop solar over 50 kWp across York and North Yorkshire. We are the commercial arm of RVTC LTD, based in Yorkshire and working UK-wide, so a York site is well within our normal reach rather than a special trip. At this scale the work sits outside the domestic MCS scheme, so it is run as a proper engineering project: an on-site drone survey, a PV*SOL model built against your half-hourly load, a design to BS 7671 and a G99 connection application to Northern Powergrid.
A system over 50 kWp is a capital decision a finance director signs off, and it earns proper engineering rather than a like-for-like swap. The case for that engineering is strongest where a building draws a high, steady daytime load, because every kilowatt-hour the array makes and the site uses on the spot is worth far more than the same unit exported. York has an unusual concentration of exactly that kind of occupier.
York's commercial roofscape is shaped by food and confectionery manufacturing more than any other industry. The city is one of the UK's premier confectionery centres, a heritage that still defines its building stock, and a large Nestlé confectionery site has run here for generations. We name these as context for the local economy and the building stock, not as customers of ours. The point for a solar design is the load shape behind those roofs. A plant running mixing, moulding, refrigeration and packing lines through the day pulls a heavy, continuous base load, and that is the profile where rooftop generation is consumed on site almost as fast as it is made. High self-consumption is what shortens payback on a system of this size, and it is why food-manufacturing roofs in York are among the strongest commercial solar prospects in the region.
Beyond the food plants, York Business Park off Outgang Lane is the city's largest commercial estate, mixing distribution, processing and professional-services units with the kind of broad, shallow-pitch roofs that take a sizeable array. Out at Clifton Moor and Monks Cross the picture changes to flat-roof retail: the big-box units at Monks Cross, the John Lewis, Next and B&Q type anchors, and the surrounding retail and light-industrial sheds carry energy-intensive lighting, refrigeration and HVAC through trading hours. The University of York estate and the grandstand roofs at York Racecourse round out a building stock that is genuinely varied for a city of this size.
Each of those roof types is modelled differently. A confectionery plant is sized to soak up generation against a flat round-the-clock demand; a Monks Cross retail shed is sized around its daytime trading peak and HVAC; a distribution unit on Outgang Lane is matched to its handling and lighting load. The PV*SOL model is what turns each one into a system specific to that meter, rather than a panel count off a roof area.
The survey that anchors the design is the same in York as anywhere we work. Our own A2 CofC and GVC qualified drone pilot, fully insured, flies the roof to build a 3D model, so the array is laid out against the real structure, shading and roof condition rather than a desktop guess. That model feeds the PV*SOL design and the yield figures we put in front of you. York is a short, ordinary journey for that survey, not an obstacle to getting a proper one.
Every commercial connection in York runs through Northern Powergrid as the local distribution network operator, and a system over 50 kWp is applied for under the G99 process rather than the simpler notification used for small domestic installs. The York network is reasonably well served for mid-sized export, so the city does not carry the named primary-substation constraints we have to design around in parts of Leeds. That does not remove the step. Northern Powergrid still has to assess and approve the connection, and the right answer for a given roof is sometimes a generation figure with a sensible export limit rather than an unrestricted one.
We handle the G99 application and the technical correspondence with Northern Powergrid as part of the project, and we size the system against your supply capacity and metering from the start, so the design that goes to the DNO is the one we expect to build.
A commercial array is a long-life asset, and many of the systems already on York's industrial and agricultural roofs date from the FiT era of 2012 to 2016. Those installs are now well into middle age: inverters reaching the end of their service life, monitoring that has gone dark, and original installers who in plenty of cases are no longer trading. We provide independent operations and maintenance through our sister operation Solar Tech Support, and the service is brand-agnostic, so we will take on and look after a system whoever originally fitted it.
That covers monitoring and fault response, inverter replacement, thermographic inspection and cleaning, whether or not we built the array. We are not going to publish a fixed response time or an SLA we have not agreed with you, but as a Yorkshire-based team a York site is a routine call-out for us, and an orphaned or underperforming system on an Outgang Lane unit or a Vale of York farm building is exactly the kind of takeover we are set up for.
York carries one of the largest conservation areas in England, wrapped around the medieval core inside and beyond the city walls, with the Minster, the Shambles and a dense run of listed frontages. That heritage designation makes the historic centre planning-sensitive and a poor fit for a visible rooftop array, and City of York Council is the local planning authority that decides how those constraints apply. The practical consequence is that the realistic commercial solar opportunity in York sits on the peripheral estates and the outer-ring stock, not on the roofs inside the bar walls.
That is where the modern flat and shallow-pitch roofs are: the distribution and processing units strung along the A1237 outer ring road, the estates around Clifton Moor and Monks Cross to the north, and the larger-span sheds at York Business Park off Outgang Lane to the west. Permitted-development rights for non-domestic rooftop solar are wider than many occupiers expect, but they are curtailed on or near listed buildings and within the conservation area, so the early planning read matters as much as the structural one. We confirm the designation for your specific roof at survey stage and design around it. Where a building sits in a sensitive setting, that constraint is settled before a panel layout is drawn, the same disciplined approach we set out across our commercial process.
Beyond the food plants and the retail parks, York carries an unusually heavy institutional and public-sector estate for a city of its size, and that stock has its own load profile worth taking seriously. The University of York's Heslington campuses, York St John in the city, the York Hospital site north of the centre and the City of York Council office estate all run steady weekday and, in the hospital's case, round-the-clock demand from lighting, IT, ventilation and clinical or research equipment. Those are the daytime-heavy and continuous loads that a well-sized array offsets on site rather than exporting, which is where the return on a system this size is strongest. We name these as context for the local economy and the building stock, not as customers of ours.
The other distinctly York factor is the railway. The city grew around the East Coast Main Line and the carriage works, and the York Central regeneration scheme behind the station is bringing a large tranche of new commercial and mixed-use floorspace forward over the coming years, much of it built to current energy standards. New large-span roofs of that kind are the easiest to design a clean array onto. For occupiers weighing the technology against grid charges and carbon reporting, our commercial solar guides set out how the engineering case is built, and we model each roof against its own half-hourly meter rather than a single York template.
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 rooftop solar over 50 kWp across York and North Yorkshire. We are Yorkshire-based and work UK-wide, so a York site is within our normal coverage. We are open that our completed installs are not yet in York itself, which is why we lead with the on-site survey and a load-matched design rather than a local project list.
York's food and confectionery plants run a high, continuous daytime load, which is the profile that gives the strongest self-consumption and the shortest payback on a system this size. The distribution units at York Business Park and the flat-roof retail at Monks Cross and Clifton Moor add further roofs with steady trading-hours demand. The local Northern Powergrid network is also reasonably well served for mid-sized export.
Northern Powergrid is the distribution network operator for York. A commercial system over 50 kWp connects under a G99 application, which we prepare and manage with the DNO as part of the project. We size the array against your supply capacity and apply a sensible export limit where that is the right outcome.
Yes. Through our sister operation Solar Tech Support we offer independent, brand-agnostic operations and maintenance, including taking over older FiT-era systems on York industrial and farm roofs whoever originally installed them. That covers monitoring, fault response, inverter replacement, thermography and cleaning. We do not quote a fixed SLA we have not agreed with you first.
We do not quote a per-kilowatt or from-price figure for York, because the honest number comes from the site, not a rate card. A commercial system over 50 kWp is priced from the drone survey and the PV*SOL model: the usable roof area and structure, your half-hourly load, the array size that matches it, the inverter and any export-limitation or battery requirement, and the G99 connection terms. Those vary far too much between a confectionery plant on a continuous load and a flat-roof retail unit at Monks Cross to carry a single price. The approach is the same wherever we work. We survey the roof, model it against your real demand, and put a costed design and a payback figure in front of you that reflects that building, not an average. There is no charge for that initial assessment.
Quickly. We are Yorkshire-based, so a York survey is a short, routine journey rather than a special trip, and we arrange the on-site drone visit at your convenience. The figure that follows comes from the survey and the PV*SOL model, not a per-mile rate or a from-price. The programme after that is set by the G99 connection process with Northern Powergrid and your own site access, not by travel time. Northern Powergrid has to assess and approve the connection for a system over 50 kWp, and that DNO step, alongside any structural works and the install window you can give us on a working site, is what shapes the timeline. We manage the G99 application and the technical correspondence as part of the project, and we give you a realistic programme once the survey and the connection position are known.
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.
