Commercial solar for warehousing & logistics.

Warehousing and logistics covers distribution sheds, fulfilment centres, cross-dock depots, parcel hubs and cold-chain pick operations. These are large single-storey buildings designed around throughput, and the electricity bill follows the same logic: forklift and MHE charging, conveyors and sortation, racking-aisle and yard lighting, dock-leveller and HVAC plant, all running through the working day.

It is the lead sector for commercial solar in the region, and for a straightforward reason. The roofs are the biggest and simplest we work with, and the load underneath them is heavy, steady and largely daytime. That combination is exactly what makes a system worth modelling properly: plenty of usable array area sitting directly above demand that lines up with when the sun is on the roof.

Solar pays best when the electricity is used on site rather than exported, because an exported unit is paid far less than the unit you would otherwise import. So the question is not how many panels the roof can hold, it is how much of the generation the building consumes as it is produced. Warehousing tends to read well on that test. A shed running picking and despatch shifts draws a broad, sustained daytime load, and MHE charging, conveyors and lighting keep pulling power right through the middle of the day when generation peaks.

Operations that carry weekend and night shifts, or a chilled or frozen pick face with refrigeration running around the clock, flatten the demand curve further and tend to self-consume more of what the array produces. A round-the-clock shed shares more of its load shape with a cold store than with a single-shift unit, and we size for the pattern we find. The match is rarely perfect, and it varies with the shift pattern, the charging regime and the seasonal swing in throughput, which is why we read your half-hourly metering data rather than quote a sector average. Where the daytime fit is strong we say so. Where battery storage would shift surplus generation into an evening or night shift, or an export limit shapes the design, we look at that on the real numbers before anything is specified.

The typical shape here is a large, unshaded flat or shallow-pitch roof with long uninterrupted runs and few obstructions, the kind of deck a modern distribution shed is built with. That gives the most usable array area per site of any sector we cover, which is why the indicative band sits at roughly 250 kWp to 1 MWp and above; a single large shed often sits in the 1 MWp+ band, while a smaller depot or a run of trade units reads more like our industrial-units sector. Treat that as orientation only. The real figure comes from the on-site survey and the PV*SOL model, sized to your actual load rather than to the roof. Older or extended units can carry mixed roof pitches, large rooflights or plant decks, and structural loading on a long-span roof is the first thing the survey checks before any layout is fixed.