MCS-Certified Data Centre Solar Specialists — 350+ UK Installations
UK specialists in solar panels for data centres. MCS-certified. NICEIC-registered. IWA-backed.
A specialist practice built for live data centre environments
We are a team of MCS-certified commercial solar engineers and project managers who work exclusively within the critical power infrastructure sector. Founded in 2012, we entered commercial solar at a time when rooftop PV was still a novelty on industrial buildings. Over the following decade we moved steadily up the complexity curve — from standard manufacturing units and logistics parks into healthcare campuses, and ultimately into the most demanding built environment in the UK: live data centre sites operating at Tier III and Tier IV reliability standards.
Our technical director, James Whitmore, leads a permanent team of MCS-certified engineers and project managers from our head office in Reading, Berkshire — positioned deliberately in the Thames Valley corridor that hosts the UK's highest density of carrier-neutral colocation and hyperscale facilities. The proximity matters: the majority of our projects are within two hours of our base, which means site visits, survey responses, and emergency call-outs happen at the pace data centre operations teams expect.
That specialisation was not accidental. Commercial solar on a warehouse roof is a fundamentally different discipline to solar on an operational data centre. The electrical infrastructure is orders of magnitude more complex. A poorly managed AC switchover carries not just a financial cost but the risk of SLA breach, reputational damage, and — in colocated environments — legal liability to tenants. We recognised early on that the competencies required to work safely in this sector — G99 Protection Relay coordination, UPS integration, harmonic analysis, security-cleared site access, roof structure assessment under live load — were rare and that most solar installers had never acquired them. We built our practice around exactly those capabilities.
Why data centres have the strongest solar business case in the UK
A data centre's electricity consumption is continuous, stable, and predictable. It runs at the same megawatt draw at 3 a.m. on Christmas morning as it does at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. That flat load profile means virtually every kilowatt-hour generated by a rooftop PV array is consumed immediately on site. There is no wasted export, no curtailment, and no dependency on time-of-use optimisation. The effective cost of solar-generated electricity is the levelised cost of energy — typically 3–5p per kWh over a 25-year asset life — set against grid rates running at 20–30p/kWh for high-consumption commercial customers on half-hourly metering.
We focus on this sector because the returns justify the technical overhead. A 750 kW rooftop in Slough, displacing power at 22p/kWh, saves approximately £156,000 in avoided electricity cost in year one. A 1 MW system on a hyperscale campus approaches £200,000 annually. At those scales, the additional cost of Tier III-compliant installation practices — phased AC commissioning, UPS energisation testing, night-shift roof access, BPSS-cleared personnel — represents a small fraction of the total project value and a fraction of the payback risk it eliminates.
Operators who choose a generic commercial solar firm and underestimate the specialist overhead frequently face delayed commissioning, Protection Relay coordination failures with the DNO, or — in the worst cases — momentary outages during AC connection work that a properly managed programme would have prevented. Our track record of zero unplanned outages across 350+ commercial installations reflects a project management methodology built for environments where downtime is measured in tens of thousands of pounds per minute.
BPSS-cleared installation teams as standard
Every engineer and project manager we place on a data centre site holds current BPSS (Baseline Personnel Security Standard) clearance. This is not an optional add-on for high-security clients — it is our company standard. All on-site personnel are listed on our company DBS and clearance register, and documentation is provided to site security teams on request before any access is granted.
BPSS clearance is the baseline expectation from security teams at carrier-neutral colocation operators and government-contracted compute facilities. Any solar installer who doesn't lead with this requirement in their proposal has either never worked in a colocation environment or is planning to apply for retrospective clearance under time pressure — a scenario that creates delays during mobilisation and security concerns during handover. We hold clearance in advance because the data centre sector requires it, not because individual clients ask for it.
All on-site personnel hold CSCS Gold or Platinum cards as a minimum. Our project managers hold PRINCE2 Practitioner or equivalent programme management qualifications and are experienced in the stakeholder complexity of live data centre environments: DNO pre-application coordination, landlord structural sign-off, planning authority liaison, and tenant communication on multi-tenanted colocated sites.
Our approach — independent and model-agnostic
We hold no distribution agreements with any panel or inverter manufacturer. This means our equipment recommendations are driven by what is optimal for the project — not by which manufacturer pays a volume rebate or has inventory they need to move. We regularly specify from leading Tier 1 manufacturers including JA Solar, Canadian Solar, REC Group, and Qcells. The choice on any given project depends on roof load limits, warranty terms, efficiency profile, and lead time at the point of procurement.
Our financial models are fully transparent. Before any project is committed to contract, you receive a detailed appraisal covering capital cost, depreciation schedule, Full Expensing tax treatment, net present value at your stated discount rate, payback period, and a 25-year cash flow table. Nothing is concealed in opaque lease structures or blended financing arrangements. If a Power Purchase Agreement structure suits your treasury policy better than a capital purchase, we introduce you to PPA developers and take no referral margin.
We do not sell energy management software, monitoring subscriptions, or ancillary services as hidden cross-sells. Our revenue is the installation contract. Our interest is in delivering a system that performs to the modelled specification, because our reputation in a sector with a small and well-networked community of procurement decision-makers depends on it entirely.
Warranty, monitoring, and long-term performance
All workmanship is backed by a 10-year Insurance-Backed Warranty (IBW), underwritten through an IWA-registered provider. This means that in the unlikely event our business were to cease trading during the warranty term, the workmanship cover remains intact and enforceable through the insurer — a requirement on all projects we deliver to infrastructure investment funds and institutional property owners.
Tier 1 panel manufacturers provide 25-year product warranties with 30-year linear performance guarantees as standard. Inverter warranty varies by manufacturer — typically 10 years extendable to 20. We include 12 months of O&M (operations and maintenance) service as standard after handover, with options for ongoing monitoring contracts under SLA terms that align with data centre operational reporting requirements.
Remote monitoring is provided via cloud-based inverter platforms with half-hourly generation data and automated fault alerting. Generation data can be integrated into existing BMS (Building Management System) platforms or energy monitoring dashboards via API where your operations team requires it.