Pubs, Restaurants & Hospitality Venues: Solar panels for pubs

Why a pub is one of the most natural homes for commercial solar

A working pub draws power right through the trading day, and that is exactly what makes solar panels for pubs such a sensible investment rather than a gesture. Cellar cooling runs constantly to keep beer and cask in condition, kitchen extraction and refrigeration build through every service, glass washers and coffee machines cycle all afternoon, and lighting carries the room from lunch into the late evening. Because all of that demand lands squarely in daylight and early-evening hours, the electricity your panels generate is used on the premises rather than sold back to the grid at a lower rate. Self-consumption is the single biggest driver of solar payback, and a busy pub or restaurant typically uses a high share of what it produces, which is why a typical install pays back in around six and a half years and then runs, largely cost-free, for the decades that follow.

Energy has become one of the largest controllable costs a licensee carries, sitting alongside wages and stock, and unlike those it is a cost you can largely fix for twenty years with a single decision. A predictable electricity bill is a rare lever in a trade where margins are tight and input prices are set elsewhere, and a system that owns a slice of your supply for two decades insulates you from the next round of tariff shocks. On top of the saving, a visible rooftop array gives an independent free house or a managed estate a credible, auditable sustainability story for customers, brewers and investors, and it nudges leased premises towards the EPC B Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard that government has consulted on for commercial property, which matters increasingly to landlords deciding whether to renew or invest in a site. With the 100% Annual Investment Allowance, the Smart Export Guarantee and the Workplace Charging Scheme all available in 2026, the commercial case for putting solar on a pub is as strong as it has been in a decade, and the surfaces most pubs already own (kitchen extensions, function wings, car parks and beer gardens) give more room to work with than operators expect.

What a typical pub install looks like and how it is sized

A system for a pub or restaurant usually sits in the 10 to 100 kW range, which is roughly 18 to 185 panels across about 60 to 600 square metres of roof. In practice that is rarely the original public frontage. The favoured spots are the flat-roofed kitchen extension, the function-room wing, the trade outbuildings and the lean-to plant rooms, which keep the array off the elevations that matter for heritage and kerb appeal. A system of that size generates in the region of 9,000 to 92,000 kWh a year and saves somewhere between 2 and 21 tonnes of CO2 annually, a figure your group can put straight into its sustainability reporting.

Simply filling the roof is rarely the right answer, because a pub is not a constant-load building. Demand peaks around lunch and evening service and dips in the quiet midmorning and mid-afternoon, so over-sizing wastes money on power you would only ever export at a low rate. Instead a modest array is sized to the genuine daytime cellar, kitchen and lighting baseload, with EV charging layered in to soak up the midday generation that would otherwise be exported. Where roof space is tight, which it often is on a historic site, a beer-garden canopy or a car-park solar carport adds meaningful capacity without touching the listed elevations, and gives drinkers shade and customers an EV-ready bay into the bargain. Throughout, the sound approach is to pull at least twelve months of half-hourly meter data and model EV-charging growth into the load before settling the final size, so the system matches how your pub actually trades across the week and the seasons rather than an optimistic snapshot.

Costs, payback and tax relief

A pub project typically lands between £10,000 and £90,000 depending on the size of the site and the roof available, with a simple payback near 6.5 years and the electricity effectively free for the fifteen to twenty plus years that follow commissioning. A small wet-led local at the lower end of that range is a very different proposition to a large roadside dining pub with a sprawling kitchen, and each is best costed on its own load and roof rather than a rule of thumb.

The biggest financial lever is tax. Solar PV qualifies as special-rate plant and machinery, so the 100% Annual Investment Allowance lets most pub businesses write off the full cost against profit in year one, worth up to a quarter of the project value back as tax saved for a limited company that pays corporation tax. It is worth being precise here: solar is a special-rate asset and does not qualify for full expensing or the old super-deduction, so the claim goes through the AIA, or the 50% First-Year Allowance where a managed estate rollout pushes total spend above the £1m AIA cap. Any surplus you do export is paid for under the Smart Export Guarantee, which matters most for pubs that are quieter midweek or out of season, when generation can outrun the cellar and kitchen load. Our cost guide sets out worked numbers for different sizes of pub, from a single free house to a multi-site estate, so you can see where your site is likely to land before you commit to a survey.

Funding routes in detail

Most single-site pubs fall well within the £1m AIA cap and are fully expensed in year one under Plant and Machinery Capital Allowances, with the 50% First-Year Allowance available where a managed estate rollout takes spend above the cap and the relief has to be split. The Smart Export Guarantee pays a supplier-set rate, which at the time of writing ranges from around 3 to 6p per kWh at some smaller suppliers to around 12 to 13p on the better fixed tariffs, for power you send back to the grid, and because those rates are not capped or regulated it pays to shop around rather than accept whatever your incumbent supplier offers.

If you are adding chargepoints for staff or customers, and many roadside and destination pubs now are, the Workplace Charging Scheme covers up to 75% of purchase and installation cost, five hundred pounds per socket and up to twenty thousand pounds per applicant from April 2026, capped at forty sockets. It pairs naturally with solar because daytime charging self-consumes generation at full value, turning the most valuable kWh on the system into a customer-facing amenity. The scheme has been extended for a final year and closes permanently on 31 March 2027, so applications should be made well ahead of then. For most pubs the funding picture is AIA plus the Smart Export Guarantee, plus the Workplace Charging Scheme where EV charging is in scope, and the combination that fits your business is worth mapping early so the paperwork is not left for you to chase.

Compliance and sector considerations

Many pubs are listed or sit in conservation areas, so Listed Building Consent and early engagement with the conservation officer are often required, and the design needs to work around that rather than treating it as a blocker. The usual answer is roof slopes hidden from public view, low-profile all-black panels, or carports and outbuildings that leave the protected frontage untouched, an approach plenty of heritage pubs now run successfully. Tied and leased houses within a pubco or brewery estate need landlord consent and usually a wayleave or licence to alter, which is best set out in a template and agreed early with the landlord, and both tenant-funded and landlord-funded routes are worth modelling so everyone can see who pays and who benefits.

On the technical side, older premises frequently have a constrained single-phase supply that can cap system size without a DNO upgrade, and a G99 application is required for connections above 16 A per phase (3.68 kW on a single phase). The roof itself can be the catch: pre-2000 trade outbuildings often have asbestos cement sheeting that cannot take panels and needs replacing first. Across all of this, ask an installer to show the usual standards: MCS commercial certification for SEG eligibility, NICEIC or NAPIT electrical work, RECC and TrustMark, with CDM 2015 on larger installs. Where your group is a large undertaking, on-site solar is also one of the most credible recommendations an ESOS energy audit can carry, and it reduces metered grid consumption directly.

How this kind of project is approached

A sound project starts with at least twelve months of your half-hourly meter data so the system is sized to the load your pub genuinely draws across the trading week, not to an optimistic roof-fill figure that looks good on paper and underperforms in practice. The roof build-up should be checked, and asbestos cement sheeting surveyed for, before any price is agreed rather than on the day of the install, so the price holds without nasty surprises mid-project. Where the supply or export capacity is the constraint, the G99 grid application is best submitted early, alongside the structural survey, to start the clock on what is usually the longest single item in the programme.

A good proposal is one clear document that models self-consumption against export, covers any landlord or brewery consent, and sets out the funding routes side by side. Worth asking for are a workmanship warranty backed by insurance, and 24/7 remote monitoring with automated underperformance alerts so a fault is flagged rather than quietly costing you generation. Work can be phased around your trading pattern in zones so the doors stay open, and the only outage needed is the final grid connection, typically a few hours booked for a quiet period or a planned shutdown. For groups, one repeatable template (rooftop, optional canopy, EV charging and a single dashboard) can roll across the estate with standard surveys and standard hardware, so you are not re-engineering every site from scratch.

Where to go next

When you are ready, see the cost guide and funding routes, then send an enquiry with your meter data to hand or read the solar FAQs first.