News / Century-old red tape keeping UK supply chain uptake of solar power in the shadows

Adding solar panels to warehouses could have knock-on effects, helping the entire supply chain push to net zero, but legislation and mindsets need to change before this is realised.

Speaking to The Loadstar on the sidelines of this week’s Multimodal event in Birmingham, Meri Braziel, chief commercial officer at digital power and infrastructure as a service provider Landways, said decisions made a century ago were hobbling the uptake of solar energy in UK supply chains.

“Britain’s electric grid runs on AC, but solar panels and devices are DC, which means the energy derived must be inverted to AC, only to be converted back to DC,” she explained.

“This process loses anywhere from 15% to 20% of the energy solar panels provide, bringing their efficacy into question. What we do at Landways is install an entirely DC system.”

The cost of installing the necessary infrastructure may be daunting, but Ms Braziel said the company’s model had been designed to address this.

She explained: “Our business runs as a digital power and infrastructure service provider, which means we install, manage and maintain the cabling and solar panels and then sell the energy to our customers.”

With the spike in energy prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ms Braziel said Landways had seen “a lot of interest”, but as prices eased so did the pressure to seek alternatives.

But, with prices hovering around 24.5p per kilowatt hour in the UK, she claimed the savings to be had were significant and that to reach parity with the cost of solar energy supplied by Landways, traditional energy suppliers would have to drop their price to 10p.

But, she said: “What we are seeing is reticence in the market to migrate to solar energy, and there are reasons for this. There are potential customers with a lot of cash that want to own the asset, and in other cases the warehouse owner/landlord may be worried about being on the hook for the cost if our client moves out – but our contracts run parallel with customer tenancies.”

Then there are fears that on cloudy days there will be no energy, but Ms Braziel stressed that “this is what the batteries are for, and we don’t sever them from the grid”.

Indeed, she noted, depending on the energy use of the warehouse occupier, solar can provide as much as 97% of the energy needs, but even at the high-use end, it would be capable of meeting 20%.

“And then there is the wider benefit  from the fact that the current grid is not up to migrating to electric vehicles,” she added. “New charging points are putting a lot of strain on the energy supply and we are seeing certain sites failing to get approval for more power.”

Nonetheless, there are hurdles beyond Landways’ reach, said Ms Braziel; For example, UK regulations require the output of solar panels to be building-specific.

She explained: “Take an industrial park where we have multiple customers. We came up with the idea of shared solar  – a sort of mini grid – where everyone benefits from each another’s panels. But under the present regulations, we are unable to do anything like this, and we believe that is something the incoming UK government should look at changing.”