Solar for business and land

Two pages so far, and both exist because the usual advice is wrong in a specific, checkable way.

Capital allowances. Commercial solar marketing says “claim full expensing”. Solar is special rate expenditure and full expensing is for main rate plant, so it does not apply. Most businesses reach 100% anyway through the Annual Investment Allowance — a different allowance, with a £1 million limit and different eligibility, which matters the moment you are above that line or are not a company.

Business rates. English onsite solar has been exempt from the rating valuation since April 2022. The exemption has an end date — 31 March 2035 — that almost no financial model we have seen mentions, even though it falls partway through the life of anything installed today. Scotland uses a relief instead, and its conditions exclude most rooftop installations.

What is not here, and why

We would rather publish two pages we can stand behind than thirteen that pad out a section. The rest of the commercial cluster is waiting on sources:

What a landowner is paid to lease land for a solar farm. The most requested figure in this whole area, and we have found no published series — only figures quoted by parties to the transaction. We will not repeat a per-acre number we cannot trace.

Commercial installation costs. The DESNZ series covers systems up to 50 kW and distinguishes domestic from non-domestic, which is useful but stops well short of the scale most commercial projects run at. What we do have.

Corporate PPAs, agrivoltaics, community share offers. Each needs primary sources we have not yet worked through.

If you work in this area and know of a source we have missed — particularly on land rents — tell us. That is the gap, and it is the kind somebody in the industry can close in one email.