Solar PPA for dairy farms

2026 indicative PPA profile

Typical system size	100-500kWp
Year-1 tariff	11-14 p/kWh
Year-1 saving	£12k-£60k
Parent sector	Farms & Agriculture

Milking never stops, so neither does the meter

A dairy holding runs one of the flattest electrical demand curves in British agriculture, and that is precisely why it suits a solar power purchase agreement so well. The vacuum pumps that serve the parlour, the plate coolers that pull heat out of fresh milk, and the bulk tank's refrigeration compressor all draw power around the clock. A robotic (AMS) herd pushes the baseload higher still, because cows present themselves to the robot through the night as well as the day. Very little of what the panels make is left over to export — most of it is swallowed on the yard the instant it is generated, at a unit rate well below grid import.

Where a 100–500 kWp array fits

Cubicle housing, the collecting-yard roof and general-purpose buildings usually give a herd enough south-facing steel to carry between 100 and 500 kWp without taking a single field out of grass. Under a PPA there is nothing to find up front: the provider funds, installs and maintains the system and invoices you only for the units you actually use, typically in an 11–14 p/kWh band. On a well-matched holding that lands as roughly £12k–£60k a year off the electricity bill.

• Pre-cooling the bulk tank shifts refrigeration load into daylight hours
• Variable-speed vacuum pumps trim the twice-daily milking peak
• Ventilation and fan cooling climb in summer, tracking peak generation

Size it to the parlour, not the roof

Because self-consumption is the whole game on a dairy, the array should be matched to your daytime and shoulder demand rather than the roof's maximum footprint — oversizing simply spills cheap units onto the export meter at a poorer rate. Model your parlour's real half-hourly profile with our savings calculator, get to grips with how a solar PPA actually works, then set dairy alongside the other agricultural profiles on the farm solar hub.