How we quote

A commercial solar price is only as good as the survey behind it. Anyone can drop a satellite outline into a spreadsheet and put a round number against it. That number tends to move the moment a real engineer walks the roof, which is exactly the wrong time for a price to change.

We quote the other way round. We survey first, model the site against your actual load, design the system that fits, and only then put a price on it. The figure you receive is for the system we have designed for your roof, rather than a placeholder that gets revised on contact with reality.

Every quote starts with a site survey, because the roof decides what is buildable. Our own pilot flies an in-house drone survey of your roof and the surrounding shading, with imagery detailed enough to plan panel layout, fixings and cable routes against the real structure rather than a map.

That survey tells us the usable area, the orientation and pitch of each plane, the obstructions and the shading through the day. It is the difference between a number that survives the first site visit and one that does not. The drone work is flown by our own pilot, who holds the A2 Certificate of Competency and a General VLOS Certificate and is fully insured.

A system sized to the roof alone is only half the picture. The other half is how your business actually uses electricity through the day and across the year. We take your half-hourly consumption data and run it against the surveyed roof in PV*SOL, the industry modelling tool used across the trade.

That model shows how much of the generation you would use on site, how much would export, and how a battery would change the shape of both. It is what turns a panel count into a designed system: one sized to your consumption profile rather than to a rule of thumb. Self-consumption is where commercial solar earns its return, so the load profile matters as much as the roof.

The survey and the model produce two things together: a designed system and a fixed, site-specific price. The design specifies the array, the inverters, the mounting and the electrical work to the standards the install is delivered against, so the price covers what will actually be built.

There is no honest "from £X" headline for commercial solar, because the right system is specific to your roof and your load. A from-price would be a guess dressed up as a figure. What we give you instead is a fixed price for a defined scope, with the assumptions stated, so it is a number you can take to a board and stand behind.

We lead with capex, because owning the system outright keeps the most of the return and qualifies for the first-year capital allowances that shorten payback. For a business with the cash and the appetite, it is usually the strongest position.

Where the cash flow needs it, the same designed system can be funded other ways, and the quote is structured so you can compare them on like-for-like terms:

• Capex, owned outright, the primary route on most projects.
• Leasing or hire purchase, spreading the cost while you still own the asset at the end.
• A power purchase agreement (PPA), where a third party funds and owns the system and you buy the generation.

We are not financial or tax advisers, so the funding decision is one to take with your accountant. Our job is to give you a designed system and a clear price that any of those routes can be built on.

Over 50 kWp your system sits outside MCS, so the quote does not lean on a single certificate. It is priced against the named engineering standards the install is delivered to, and the scope you receive says so on the face of it. The figure covers electrical work designed to BS 7671, commissioning and inspection to IEC 62446-1, a G99 connection agreed with your network operator, and a project planned and built under CDM 2015. Each of those carries cost, and a quote that omits them is cheaper because it is buying less. We would rather show the standards inside the price than discover the gap at handover. How that engineering stack assures a build without MCS is set out on design and engineering.

The price does not appear from nowhere. It hardens through defined stages, and each one replaces an assumption with a measured fact. The first rung is an indicative desktop model from imagery and your load, covered on remote survey. The next is the drone survey, where our own pilot, who holds the A2 Certificate of Competency and a General VLOS Certificate and is fully insured, flies the roof so the layout, fixings and cable routes are set against the real structure. Only once the surveyed roof and your half-hourly load are modelled in PV*SOL do we put a fixed figure against a designed scope. Reading from imagery to a measured survey is the difference between a number that moves on the first site visit and one that holds to contract.

The quote is written to be read by a finance or facilities director with nothing to decode. It states the designed system, the scope of work against the standards above, the assumptions the price depends on, and the funding routes laid out on like-for-like terms so capex, leasing or hire purchase and a PPA can be compared directly. We do not print a headline rate, because a from-price for a site-specific asset is a guess in the shape of a figure. For the cost drivers behind any commercial system, the commercial solar cost guide explains what moves the number, and the finance pages set out the routes. Any payback or return is modelled against your own site and disclosed with its basis, never promised as a generic percentage, and capital allowances are described as the mechanism to confirm with your accountant.

Two buildings with the same array and the same load can return very different figures, because the money turns on the tariff underneath them. What you pay to import, what you are paid to export, and when those prices apply decide what each modelled unit is worth, so we run the designed system against the rates you actually hold rather than a market average. A commercial electricity price is also more than its headline unit rate: your bill carries network and policy charges on top of the energy cost, and on larger supplies some of those are themselves time-banded, which changes when generation and any stored energy are worth most. The export side has its own ceiling, because the volume you can push back is capped by what your network operator has granted at the connection, so the model respects that cap rather than assuming everything the array makes can be sold.

Where the modelling shows a different tariff structure would lift the return, a time-of-use import rate or a better export deal, we put it in the proposal as an opportunity with the modelled effect and the assumptions behind it. We stop there. We are solar and storage engineers rather than an energy broker or a switching service, so the supplier decision and any switch stay with you or your broker, and we are happy to hand the flagged opportunity over with the modelling that supports it. Any payback or return in the proposal is modelled from your own data with the basis disclosed, never a guaranteed saving, because tariff prices move and your load changes.