Worked example: 145kWp PPA on a Lincolnshire Dairy Farm
An illustrative 145 kWp farms solar PPA: at 13.5 p/kWh over 25 years, the modelled year-1 saving is £14,500.
Illustrative example — not a real deal
This is a hypothetical worked example, written to show how a solar PPA's numbers work for this kind of site. The site, the operator and every figure are illustrative: the tariff and term sit inside this site's indicative bands and the saving is modelled from them. It does not describe any real organisation, and no contract is claimed.
| Worked example — modelled figures | |
|---|---|
| Sector | Farms |
| System size | 145 kWp |
| PPA tariff (year 1) | 13.5 p/kWh |
| Contract term | 25 years |
| Year-1 saving (modelled) | £14,500 |
A Lincolnshire dairy, told as a typical case
Read this as a typical dairy example rather than a specific farm. The setup: a Lincolnshire holding milking 380 cows through a robotic system, with roughly 4,500 m² of barn roof overhead. Three pressures pushed solar up the agenda — margins across the sector are thin, the farm's milk buyer had started cascading ESG expectations down its supply chain, and the rural grid connection was proving unreliable exactly when chilling demand peaked. The barn roofs were the obvious host surface, though their condition would turn out to matter as much as their area. Owning a system outright was never realistic on farm cashflow, which is what made a PPA worth examining.
Resilience mattered as much as the tariff
Unusually for these stories, the headline isn't only the unit price. A 145 kWp on-site PPA was paired with a 200 kWh battery sized for night-time chilling, so the value split two ways: cheaper daytime generation plus genuine resilience. On the seed numbers the battery removes eight to ten outage incidents a year, each one a real risk of spoiled milk — worth around £3,500 of avoided loss annually on top of the tariff saving.
The asbestos problem — and how the provider handled it
The site survey found asbestos on one of the three barn roofs, needing an £18k strip-and-replace before panels could go up. Rather than hand the farmer a bill, the provider absorbed the cost and recovered it through a small tariff adjustment — a reminder that under a PPA the funder carries build risk. It also shows why how PPA pricing is built up is worth reading line by line.
Indicative outcome
Across a 25-year term at 13.5 p/kWh, year one delivers about £14,500 in electricity savings before the outage-avoidance value is counted. The structure also leaves the milking operation entirely unchanged day to day — the funder's meters simply sit behind the existing supply. For a farm business, a fixed low tariff with no upfront cost is often the decisive point. Test the figures for your own barn footprint on the savings calculator, or explore structures on the financing page.
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