solar panels for fabrication in Portsmouth

Why Portsmouth’s engineering and marine trades are moving on solar

Portsmouth is a fabrication city with saltwater in its veins. The dockyard turned steel into warships for centuries, and that heritage never left: the city is still home to Portsmouth Naval Base, a dense marine-engineering supply chain, and a working island of sub-contract fabricators, sheet-metal shops and precision engineers across Portsea and Farlington. For these shops, electricity bills have roughly doubled since 2021, and a workshop running plasma cutters, MIG and TIG sets, CNC centres, a rotary-screw compressor and weld-fume extraction has watched power climb past almost every cost except steel and labour. On the fixed-price, competitively-tendered marine and defence work that defines much of the city’s base, a volatile power bill eats straight into margin, and solar fixes a chunk of it for 25 years.

Voyager Park, Lakeside North Harbour and the PO-postcode workshop estate

Because Portsmouth is built on an island, its industrial land is tightly packed. Voyager Park off Portfield Road in PO3 mixes trade-counter units with genuine fabrication tenants in clear-span portal-frame sheds, exactly the roofs solar wants. The Airport Industrial Estate around the former Portsmouth aerodrome and the units off Quartremaine Road and Walton Road in PO6 carry a spine of sheet-metal shops, sub-contract welders and precision machinists. To the north, Lakeside North Harbour spans PO6 with newer buildings offering 1,500 to 6,000 square metres of unobstructed roof, comfortably supporting 200kW to 900kW arrays sized to a real welding and machining load.

We deliver across PO3, PO6 and the older PO1 and PO2 harbourside sheds around Portsea, and cover the clusters off the island towards Gosport, Fareham, Havant and Waterlooville.

Net zero 2030 and what it means for a Portsmouth fab shop

Portsmouth City Council declared a climate emergency and set a 2030 net zero target, 20 years ahead of the national deadline, via the Portsmouth Climate Emergency Plan. The city also sits inside the Solent Freeport, and a fabrication site that physically falls within a designated Freeport special tax site can access a 100% first-year Enhanced Capital Allowance on qualifying new plant, worth checking first, since it applies only inside the designated area, not to a generic unit.

Planning is rarely the obstacle: rooftop PV is normally Permitted Development under Class A Part 14 of the GPDO 2015, and the old 1MW cap was removed in December 2023, so even a large array usually needs no application, provided panels stay within 200mm of a sloping roof or 600mm of a flat one, the seafront conservation areas around Old Portsmouth and Southsea aside. The sharper pressure is procurement: naval, marine and defence buyers now flow Scope 2, net-zero and responsibly-sourced-steel questions down their supplier scorecards, and a fabricator with an on-site renewable line item scores better when the tender is scored, not just priced.

Sizing the array to a marine day-shift on Voyager Park

A Voyager Park sub-contract welding shop turning naval-supply-chain work runs a single day shift, so its consumption sits right under the midday solar peak and little generation leaks to the grid at the low export rate, which shortens the payback here. Rather than quote from roof area, we start with 12 months of your half-hourly meter file and size the system to the loads that run all day: the rotary-screw compressor, the LEV fume extraction, the laser chiller and the CNC coolant pumps, letting the plasma and MIG peaks draw on the midday surplus. See how a meter file becomes a costed system on our cost page and test the figures with the savings calculator. Portsmouth is one of the sunniest cities in the country, so a well-matched Lakeside North Harbour array strips a five-figure sum off a doubled bill each year.

Grid capacity is the other thing that can slow a Portsmouth job. The city sits in the Southern Electric Power Distribution (SSEN) area, so any commercial array is always a G99 connection; on a dense island grid where feeder headroom can be tight, we submit it on day one and use G100 export limitation or a battery where needed.

We build the array around your process

The design changes with the load: a sub-contract welding and engineering workshop with spiky MIG and TIG loads is sized differently from a laser and plasma cutting house whose fibre-laser chillers and compressors give a large steady baseload. Because HSE Safety Bulletin STSU1-2019 treats all welding fume, including mild steel, as a carcinogen, mandatory LEV ductwork and discharge stacks penetrate the same roof as the array, so we route the panels, cabling and walkways around your extraction penetrations, and on heavier structural bays deduct any EOT crane-rail dead load from the roof’s residual capacity before a 15 to 25 kg per square metre array goes on. Request a quote and a free feasibility study returns an indicative size, generation forecast and payback within a week.

The roof-stock reality on Portsmouth’s older harbourside estates

What most often decides whether a Portsmouth job runs smoothly is the sheet you are fixing to, and this island carries an unusually old roof stock. The pre-2000 sheds around Portsea, the harbourside units in PO1 and PO2, and the older ranges off Walton Road and Quartremaine Road in PO6 were very often clad in asbestos-cement, which under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 must be surveyed before anyone fixes into it and cannot carry rooftop PV directly. Where a survey confirms asbestos-cement, the route is to over-clad or re-roof first, and because new panels are warranted for 25 years, longer than these tired coverings will last, doing the roof and the array as one project is frequently the sensible call. Fragile fibre-cement and corroded steel-profile roofs that are not asbestos still need a CDM 2015 fragile-roof check.

Portsmouth’s marine air makes this worse than an inland estate. Salt-laden wind off the Solent has been eating the fixings and purlins on these Voyager Park and Airport Industrial Estate sheds for decades, so our survey flags any corroded purlin before design and the mounting, framing and cable containment are specified in marine-grade stainless and aluminium. On the older Portsmouth estates a tired asbestos or corroded roof is usually not a reason to walk away from solar, but the reason to pair the array with a re-clad the shed already needed.