Solar and charging for dealerships and showrooms

A dealership draws power from early morning valeting through to late evening viewing, seven days in most groups. Showroom lighting is bright and constant, comfort cooling runs hard because of the glazing, and the workshop adds compressors, lifts, extraction and a spray booth that spikes whenever it cures.

That shape is close to the best case for solar. Generation rises with the trading day and falls as the site quietens, so most of what a roof produces is consumed rather than exported. The exception is Sunday and bank holiday closure, which is one reason storage tends to appear in the sizing conversation on larger sites.

The assessment adjusts annual yield for orientation, so a workshop roof facing east and west will show a lower figure than a south facing one. That is the honest answer rather than a headline number.

The building most people picture is the least useful part of the site. Showrooms are glazed on the elevations and often on the roof, and where they are not, the roof is a shallow architectural form governed by brand standards. Very little of it carries panels.

The workshop, parts store, valeting bay and MOT bay are the real roof assets. They are usually simple profiled metal decks, structurally straightforward and out of the customer sightline. A forecourt or display canopy adds area, shelters stock from hail and sun damage, and puts generation directly above where charge points want to be.

Roof condition matters more than roof size on these buildings. Workshop roofs take a hard life from extraction and fumes, and an installer in the network will want a condition and structural review at feasibility rather than after mobilisation.

Franchised sites operate under manufacturer corporate identity rules that govern the customer facing elevations, signage, colours and often the canopy design. Those rules rarely prohibit solar, but they can dictate where it may be visible from and what a canopy structure is allowed to look like.

The practical step is to check the current standards with your brand manager before design sign off. Retrofitting a compliant canopy after the fact is expensive, and a scheme that has been cleared in principle moves far more quickly through the group approval process.

Where a site is refurbishing to a new corporate identity anyway, that is the cheapest moment to build in the structure, cable routes and switchgear capacity, even if the array itself follows later.

Manufacturers increasingly set minimum charge point counts and power ratings as a condition of franchise. Add demonstrator fleets, customer charging, courtesy vehicles and staff, and a site that once had a modest supply is suddenly capacity constrained.

Solar contributes to that load during the day, particularly to slower destination charging while a customer is in the showroom. It will not meet a rapid charger at full output, and any proposal that suggests otherwise is overselling. What closes the gap is load managed charging, which sequences and throttles points so the site stays inside its agreed capacity.

That matters commercially because a supply upgrade is often the single largest cost in a dealership electrification project, with a lead time set by the network operator rather than by you. Generation, storage and load management together frequently avoid or defer it.

We do not install. We assess your site, produce an indicative system size, generation, saving and payback from your own roof outline and spend, and then match you with one vetted installer from the network that works in your area and has done motor retail before.

Groups with several sites are usually better served by a screening exercise across the estate first, ranking sites by roof condition, consumption and charging plans, rather than by treating each dealership as a separate project.

The service is free to you. The installer pays us if work proceeds, which is how we are able to tell you when a site is not worth doing.