Solar Panels for Pub Restaurants and Gastropubs

The pub load profile, honestly assessed

Pubs are a more interesting solar case than they first appear. The headline trade is evening-led, which looks like a poor match for daytime generation — but the load underneath tells a different story. Cellar cooling runs 24 hours a day to keep beer at temperature, and it works hardest on hot afternoons when the array is at peak output. Bottle fridges, ice machines, and glasswashers cycle constantly. A gastropub kitchen starts prep mid-morning and runs through last food orders, pulling extraction, refrigeration, and cooking loads across the entire generation window. Add daytime trade — and most food-led pubs now take more at lunch and afternoon than a decade ago — and a typical food-led pub self-consumes 55–75% of a sensibly sized array without storage.

Pubs also tend to have something town-centre restaurants lack: roof. Function rooms, kitchen extensions, skittle alleys, and outbuildings offer mounting space that a high-street unit cannot match, and car park or garden outbuildings sometimes suit ground-adjacent arrays. The constraint is rarely space; it is roof condition and orientation, which is why the first step is to check the roof's condition, orientation and structure before anything is designed.

The numbers for a typical pub

A 15 kW system on a food-led pub costs roughly £18,000–£24,000 installed and generates around 13,000 kWh a year. At 65% self-consumption about 8,450 kWh a year is used on site; at 25–35p/kWh that avoids roughly £2,100–£3,000 of purchases a year, plus a modest Smart Export Guarantee top-up. Divide the installed cost by that figure for the simple payback before tax relief. The £1m Annual Investment Allowance usually means 100% relief in year one for a business under the limit, which for a profitable company effectively knocks a quarter off the net price. Larger gastropubs at 25–30 kW scale see proportionally better cost per kW and similar paybacks on bigger absolute savings. Full worked examples are on the costs page, and the tax detail is in the VAT and capital allowances guide.

Ownership structures: who says yes

Pub tenure shapes the project more than any technical factor. Freeholders simply proceed. Free-of-tie leaseholders need landlord consent — usually granted as a licence for alterations, and often welcomed because of the EPC uplift. Tied tenants need pubco consent, and the smart approach is to frame the proposal around the pubco's own estate interests: better EPC, lower tenant operating costs, more resilient tenancy. Some pub companies run their own rooftop solar programmes, so the concept may need no introduction. Where the tenancy has under five years to run, the payback maths needs either a longer lease or a landlord contribution.

Heritage buildings: what to check first

A meaningful share of the UK's pub stock is listed or sits in a conservation area, and this is where pub solar most often goes wrong in inexperienced hands. The rules are workable: Listed Building Consent for listed properties, with arrays placed on rear slopes, flat roofs behind parapets, or outbuildings; conservation area policies that restrict street-visible panels but rarely prohibit concealed ones. An unlisted commercial building often needs no planning application, but listed buildings and conservation areas have extra rules, so check with the local planning authority. What kills projects is discovering these constraints after design. Check the heritage position first, and where consent looks unlikely consider the alternatives — outbuilding arrays, or accepting that solar is not right for the building.

Trading through the install

Roof work on a typical pub system usually takes three to eight days, and it is worth asking any installer to place scaffolding so the front door, garden, and delivery access stay open. The only power-down is normally the final connection — two to four hours, ideally for a closed morning. Cellar cooling tolerates that window comfortably with doors kept shut, so ask the installer to agree the timing against your cellar services schedule, not around it.