Alectrona
Commercial solar by sectorA council does not buy one roof, it decarbonises a mixed estate, so the work is to match generation to load building by building across offices, depots, leisure centres and housing, and to fit that programme to a funding route such as the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme.
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.
This page is for the people who buy energy projects for the public sector: local authorities and combined authorities, NHS trusts and arm's-length bodies, fire and police estates, social housing providers and the framework teams that procure on their behalf. The job here is rarely a single building. It is a varied estate, held for the long term, that a published net-zero target now commits to decarbonising.
That makes the public sector a different kind of buyer from any single occupier on this hub. A council runs civic offices, a works depot, a leisure centre, a library, a household waste site and a stock of housing, all under one programme and often one procurement. Each of those buildings uses electricity at a different time of day, so the solar case is not one load shape, it is a portfolio of them. We size the programme building by building, and we keep the funding route and the procurement rules in view from the start, because for a public buyer those shape the project as much as the roofs do.
Engineer-led commercial solar, over 50 kWp and outside MCS.
Solar earns most when the electricity is used on site. A unit consumed offsets an expensive import unit, while a unit exported is paid far less, so the value of any single array tracks how well its output lines up with that building's demand through the day. The reason the public sector needs handling as a programme rather than a project is that this match is genuinely different in each building, and an estate holds the full range at once.
A civic office self-consumes well on weekday daytime load and exports at weekends. A works depot draws plant, workshop and vehicle-charging load through the working day. A leisure centre runs pool, ventilation and gym plant close to continuously, so it self-consumes a high share, while a school in the estate matches term time but empties over the summer. Social housing, depending on how the supply is metered, may put the benefit with the landlord, the communal areas or the tenants, which is the same landlord-tenant metering split we work through on let buildings. No sector average survives contact with that spread, which is exactly why we model each building's half-hourly load and size its array to the demand it actually carries. Where a building exports more than it uses, we say so, and we look at whether battery storage, an estate-wide view that balances the strong and weak sites, or a different array size makes the honest case. The aim is to match generation to load across the whole estate, not to fill every roof.
There is no single typical building here, which is the point. A public-sector estate spans large flat-roofed leisure and depot sheds, pitched office and library roofs, and the smaller varied roofs of a housing stock, so the array shape, the structural picture and the planning position differ from one building to the next. Because the load and the roof vary so widely across the portfolio, the indicative size varies widely too, from a modest array on a single library or office up to the larger systems a leisure centre or depot can carry, which across a whole council estate portfolio points to an indicative span of roughly 100 kWp to 1 MWp and beyond. Treat that as orientation only. It is not a quote, it carries no price, and there is deliberately no single band to plan a whole estate around, because the total is built up from individual buildings rather than read off the estate as a whole. The real figure for each building comes from its own on-site survey and PV*SOL model, sized to that building's load, and the programme is the sum of those individual results rather than a roof estimate across the estate.
Because the buildings differ so widely, the programme rarely lands as one system size, so we plan it as a sequence rather than a single switch-on. A library or small civic office may sit in the tens of kWp, a works depot or leisure centre can run into several hundred, and a whole estate taken together can pass 1 MWp across its sites. We rank the buildings by how well each self-consumes and how quickly its modelled case stacks up, then lead the early phases with the roofs that earn first and let the weaker sites follow once the funded case is proven on the ground. That ranking is not guesswork: it comes out of the per-building PV*SOL model and the half-hourly load for each site, which gives an honest self-consumption split before anything is committed.
For a public buyer that phasing matters twice over, because it lets the capital land across more than one budget year and lets the early metered results from phase one feed the business case for the phases that follow. The funding route sets its own rhythm on top of that, since a grant-supported programme such as the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme runs to application and reporting windows that the phasing has to respect, and where an arm's-length or trading body inside the estate pays corporation tax we flag the capital-allowances position alongside the grant rather than treating the two as alternatives. Any payback or bill-reduction figure for the estate is modelled, not promised, with the basis disclosed building by building, and we point to the finance pages for how that case is built rather than printing a headline number against a varied estate it could not honestly fit.
A council holds its estate for the long term, so the operations-and-maintenance position carries as much weight as the install date, and we set it out alongside the build rather than after it. A spread of arrays across offices, depots, leisure centres and housing is a portfolio of assets to be monitored over its life rather than a single roof to be handed over and forgotten, and the case the funding rested on only holds if each site actually generates what the model said it would. We design the programme so that every building reports its generation back to one place, which lets an estates team see a failed string or an underperforming inverter across the whole estate instead of waiting for a bill to drift, and it gives the carbon-reporting numbers a published net-zero target depends on a measured source rather than an estimate.
The long-term monitoring and maintenance plan covers the inverter and isolation checks, the IEC 62446-1 re-tests and the panel-cleaning and access arrangements that a multi-site estate needs to keep its arrays at the performance ratio the model assumed, which we treat as a modelling starting point we confirm in PV*SOL rather than a guaranteed output. Because every system over 50 kWp sits outside MCS, the assurance through the operating life is the same non-MCS engineering stack the build was delivered under, with works run under CDM 2015 and commissioning evidenced to IEC 62446-1, so the estate has a documented maintenance trail rather than a warranty card. For a public buyer answerable for the spend, that durable monitoring is part of how the programme proves it delivered rather than an optional extra bolted on at the end.
How a public-sector job is bought is as much a part of the work as how it is built, and we scope to that from the first conversation. A council or trust rarely awards a programme this size by a single direct order; it runs a compliant procurement, often calling off a public-sector framework, and weights social value in the award alongside price rather than judging on cost alone. We deliver to those rules and build the documentation a compliant route needs, including the local employment, skills, supply-chain and carbon commitments that the social-value criteria are scored against, set out so they can be measured rather than asserted.
That shapes the technical evidence pack too, because the surveys, the per-building PV*SOL models and the connection position all feed the bid as well as the design, and a funded scheme expects them in a form its reporting can audit. Treating an estate as one programme rather than a string of separate orders is also what keeps the procurement proportionate, since a single planned programme can be procured and governed once instead of being re-tendered building by building. The same estate-as-portfolio approach runs through how we handle an NHS trust and a university or college estate, where mixed buildings, a published net-zero target and public-sector funding shape the work in much the same way.
A single occupier has one load shape; a council has a portfolio of them. Offices, depots, leisure centres, libraries and housing all use electricity at different times, so a roof that self-consumes well sits next to one that exports more. We model each building's half-hourly load and size its array individually, then build the estate-wide programme up from those results. That lets you phase the work, lead with the buildings that earn first, and treat the estate as one programme rather than a string of unconnected jobs.
The Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme, administered through Salix, is a common route for public-sector solar and wider decarbonisation, and we design and document the work so it fits a grant-funded programme. That means surveys, modelling and an evidence pack that a funding application and its reporting require, sequenced around the scheme's windows and conditions. We are not the funder and cannot guarantee an award, but we build the technical case the bid rests on and deliver to the procurement rules that come with public money.
Public-sector procurement weights social value in the award, not price alone, so the way a scheme is delivered matters alongside what it costs. We can set out the local employment, skills, supply-chain and carbon commitments a programme supports, and document them so they can be measured against the award criteria. It is part of how we scope a public-sector job from the start rather than an afterthought once the design is fixed.
There is deliberately no single figure for an estate, because the buildings are too varied. As orientation only, a council estate portfolio sits in an indicative span of roughly 100 kWp to 1 MWp and beyond, from a modest array on a library or office up to the larger systems a leisure centre or depot can carry. That carries no price and is not a quote. The real figure for each building comes from its own on-site drone survey and PV*SOL model, sized to that building's half-hourly load, and the programme total is the sum of those individual results.
We do not put a price on this page, because a public-sector programme is the sum of individually sized buildings rather than a single number, and a real figure only comes from each building survey and load model. We model the site before we quote, and the first feasibility read is free. What we can be clear about is the shape of the cost: larger arrays cost less per kWp installed than small ones, so the figure per building falls as the system grows, and across a varied estate that is why a single estate price would mislead. For a public buyer the more useful question is usually how the cost is met, which is where the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme and other grant routes come in, and we build the technical evidence pack a funded bid rests on. We are not the funder and cannot guarantee an award. Any payback or return is modelled per building with the basis disclosed, not promised as a headline; the finance pages set out how that case is built.
There is no single figure, because an estate is delivered as a phased programme rather than one install, so each building runs its own track. A site moves through an on-site drone survey and PV*SOL model, then design, then a G99 connection agreed with the network, which can take a number of weeks and is often the critical path, then installation and IEC 62446-1 commissioning. We sequence the buildings around that, and around the funding scheme's own application and reporting windows, so the early phases can be on roofs while later connections are still being agreed. Where the estate falls inside Northern Powergrid territory across Yorkshire and the north-east, that is the network operator we lodge the G99 applications with. We set out an honest programme timeline against your specific estate at survey stage rather than promising a fixed date here.
We model your half-hourly consumption against a system sized from an on-site drone survey, so the figure you get is yours, not a from-price. No obligation, no MCS gatekeeping on systems this size.