Employer & Office Car Parks: Solar carports

Why a workplace car park is one of the best-matched solar carport sites there is

An office or employer car park has a load shape that suits a solar carport almost perfectly. The building is busy from nine to five on weekdays, which is exactly when the canopy generates, so generation is consumed in the building at full retail rate rather than exported. Weekday occupancy lines up with the solar peak, self-consumption is high, and the same canopy gives your staff sheltered, branded parking that doubles as the structure and feed-in for the EV charging your workforce increasingly expects. For an employer juggling a net-zero target and an EV-charging mandate at the same time, a workplace solar carport answers both with one structure and one dig, on land (the staff car park) that currently earns nothing per square metre. Delivering solar and charging together is also the cheapest way to do both, because it avoids digging the car park twice and lets the daytime solar directly absorb the daytime charging demand.

There is a people dimension to this that pure rooftop solar never delivers. Staff EV charging is a recruitment and retention benefit, and a visible canopy is a sustainability statement your own workforce sees every day, which carries weight in graduate recruitment and ESG reporting alike. A workplace carport also supports Scope 1 and Scope 2 reporting at once, displacing grey-fleet mileage as staff switch to electric while cutting the carbon intensity of the building's bought-in power. Energy is a controllable cost, and fixing a large slice of the office electricity bill for two decades gives a facilities or estates director real budgeting certainty against a backdrop of rising grid prices. The objection we hear most is that payback looks longer than rooftop, and that is fair, the steel structure is the reason, but the workplace carport returns value rooftop does not: the Workplace Charging Scheme grant on the sockets, avoided grid cost on staff and fleet charging, and a visible brand asset, all of which belong in the business case alongside the panels.

A common worry is that EV chargers and solar are separate projects on separate budgets, but at a workplace they are cheapest delivered together. The carport provides the structure, the cable routes and a behind-the-meter solar supply that feeds the chargers at your generation cost rather than full grid retail, so daytime solar directly absorbs daytime charging demand, you qualify for the Workplace Charging Scheme grant on the sockets, and you avoid digging the car park twice. For a leased workplace or a single building on a wider estate, the work still goes ahead with landlord consent and, where relevant, a benefit-sharing agreement, and where the car park shares a grid connection with rooftop PV we confirm the spare DNO capacity before committing to a size.

What a typical install looks like and how we size it

For a workplace car park we usually design a canopy in the 60 to 300 kW range, roughly 135 to 665 panels spanning a 40 to 200 bay car park (about 480 to 2,400 square metres of canopy), generating around 54,000 to 270,000 kWh a year and saving 12 to 62 tonnes of CO2 annually. Sizing follows the parking footprint, not the office roof: plan around 1.5 to 2.0 kWp per bay (4 to 6 panels and about 12 square metres of canopy each), so a 200 kWp system covers roughly 100 to 130 bays. At UK yields of 850 to 1,000 kWh per kWp per year, each bay generates roughly 1,200 to 1,300 kWh annually, and we test that against the building's weekday load from half-hourly data. Because weekday nine-to-five occupancy matches the PV peak, we size for high self-consumption into the building first, layer staff EV charging on top, and treat the rest as weekend export. The steel structure is a fixed cost at around 45% of the project, so a 40-bay scheme carries a higher per-kWp price than a 200-bay scheme, and we will show you where the value curve turns for your car park before you commit. Tandem, double-row and single-row canopy designs let us fit the array to the layout you have, including disabled and EV-priority bays.

Costs, payback and tax relief

A workplace carport project typically lands between £90,000 and £480,000 depending on bay count, with a simple payback near 9 years. Carports run around £1,200 to £3,000 per kWp against £600 to £1,000 for rooftop, and that is longer than rooftop, but for a workplace site the panel-only payback understates the return. The PV plant qualifies for the 100% Annual Investment Allowance, so most companies write that element off against profit in year one, worth up to a quarter of the PV cost back as tax saved, with most single-site installs sitting inside the £1m annual AIA cap (the steel may be treated separately, confirm with your accountant). On top sits the avoided grid cost on building self-consumption, the avoided grid cost on staff and fleet charging, and the Smart Export Guarantee on weekend surplus. Modelled together as a blended return, a workplace carport is materially stronger than the headline payback suggests, and the return improves with bay count as the steel cost spreads. Our cost guide works through the numbers, and the funding page details the grant and export side.

Funding routes in detail

The Workplace Charging Scheme is the headline funder for an employer site, because the EV-charging element is core rather than incidental here. From 1 April 2026 it covers up to 75% of socket purchase and installation cost, capped at £500 per socket, for up to 40 sockets across all of an applicant's sites, claimed through an OZEV-authorised installer, and the scheme runs to 31 March 2027. The 100% Annual Investment Allowance covers the PV plant within the £1m annual cap, giving up to a 25% effective year-one tax saving for a limited company. The Smart Export Guarantee matters more for weekday-only offices than for 24/7 sites, because an office that is dark at weekends exports significantly, so at supplier-set tariffs of typically 4 to 15p per kWh it is worth shopping for the best export deal. Scottish and Welsh employers should also check devolved EV and renewables support, including interest-free low-carbon transport loans in Scotland, which can be more generous than the England-only equivalents and which we can use alongside the Workplace Charging Scheme. The separate EV Infrastructure Grant for SMEs closed on 31 March 2026. As an OZEV-authorised installer we claim the Workplace Charging Scheme voucher on your behalf.

Compliance and sector considerations

Class OA prior approval applies to most non-domestic off-street workplace car parks in England, which means a 56-day determination on siting, design, glare and drainage rather than full planning. Where the total inverter capacity exceeds 17 kW per phase, a G99 application is required, which on a workplace canopy of this size is almost always the case, so we submit it early and run the DNO capacity check up front. Glare onto neighbouring premises and the highway is the most common prior-approval condition and is fully manageable with anti-reflective module glass and a formal glare and glint study, which we include in the submission. Drainage matters too: a new impermeable canopy over a car park changes run-off, so a SuDS strategy directing it to a permeable area is required, with gutters, downpipes and discharge designed to a soakaway or permeable zone. Watch the 4m height limit, the 10m residential setback, the no-advertising rule, and the exclusions for listed, scheduled and conservation-area sites, which need full planning. The structural works fall under CDM 2015 and Eurocode (BS EN 1991) wind and snow loading, connected chargepoints must meet the Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021, and the PV follows SPF1981 fire-safety design. MCS commercial certification underpins SEG eligibility.

How we approach this kind of project

We begin with your half-hourly meter data so the canopy is sized to the building's weekday load rather than to the size of the car park, modelling building self-consumption first, then staff and fleet charging, then export, so you see a blended return. We confirm the planning route, prepare and submit the Class OA prior-approval application including the glare study and SuDS strategy, and we submit the G99 grid application early because the connection is usually the longest item on the programme, often 6 to 18 months on a constrained network, and where export is tight we can design for self-consumption only to cut the timeline. You get a fixed-price proposal, steel engineered to Eurocode loading for a 25-year design life that matches the PV warranty, and a 10-year insurance-backed workmanship warranty. The car park stays open throughout, with construction phased around your working week, the most disruptive foundation and steel-erection stages programmed for quiet periods, and the only full outage, the final grid connection, scheduled out of hours for typically 4 to 8 hours. Expect roughly 4 to 9 months from contract to commissioning, with the physical canopy and PV build taking 4 to 12 weeks depending on bay count, and we offer 10 to 25 year operations and maintenance with remote monitoring afterwards.

An illustrative example

As an illustrative composite based on typical UK workplace projects: a professional-services employer with a 90-bay staff car park, nine-to-five weekday occupancy and a grey fleet to electrify, fitted a 120 kW canopy of around 265 panels over 70 bays, plus 24 EV charging sockets. The array generated roughly 108,000 kWh a year with high weekday self-consumption into the building and surplus exported under the Smart Export Guarantee at weekends. The Workplace Charging Scheme grant was claimed on the 24 sockets at up to £500 each, the PV plant was written off in year one under the Annual Investment Allowance, the scheme was delivered under Class OA prior approval with no full planning needed, and the canopy became a staff-facing sustainability asset used in recruitment, with a payback near 9 years. The figures are illustrative and depend on your bays, building load, tariff and fleet plans.

If your organisation also runs customer or visitor parking, see solar carports for retail car parks and business park car park canopies. When you are ready, read the cost guide, check the grants and funding, browse the solar carport FAQs, or request a free feasibility.