Grants and funding for solar panels for dealerships

There is no single headline grant that pays for solar on a car dealership, but there is a stack of tax reliefs and funding routes that, used together, cut the real cost of a project sharply. The biggest lever is tax relief, the next is funding for the EV charging that pairs so well with solar on a forecourt, and the third is the export income you earn for power you do not use on site. Below is how each one works, how they combine, and the deadlines worth watching.

Tax relief does most of the heavy lifting

For a limited company, the 100% Annual Investment Allowance is usually the single most valuable benefit. It lets you write off the first £1m of qualifying plant and machinery in the year you spend it, and most single-site dealership installs fall comfortably inside that cap. At current corporation tax rates that is an effective saving of up to 25% of the system cost in year one. One important detail people get wrong: solar is a special-rate asset, so it does not qualify for the headline full-expensing scheme. You claim it through the AIA, or, on spend above the £1m cap, through the 50% First-Year Allowance. Multi-site dealer groups rolling solar across an estate often exceed the cap and split the claim across AIA and the 50% FYA. We work this through with your accountant before contracts are signed so the timing of the spend lands in the right accounting period. See the official capital allowances guidance for the current rules.

The Workplace Charging Scheme funds your EV chargers

EV charging is no longer optional for most franchised dealerships. Manufacturers increasingly mandate customer and demonstrator charging as a brand standard, and those chargers love solar because daytime charging self-consumes generation at full value. The Workplace Charging Scheme, run by the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles, covers up to 75% of the cost of buying and installing chargepoints. From 1 April 2026 the grant rises to £500 per socket and up to £20,000 per applicant, capped at 40 sockets. The catch is timing: the scheme has been extended for a final year and closes permanently on 31 March 2027, so any dealership planning charger investment should apply well before then. We design the solar and the chargepoints as one project and handle the WCS application for you, because the combined business case beats either project on its own.

Getting paid for what you export

The Smart Export Guarantee requires larger licensed suppliers to pay you for surplus electricity sent back to the grid. Tariffs are supplier-set and currently sit roughly between 4p and 15p per kWh in 2026, with some smart, time-of-use tariffs higher, so it pays to shop around. For a dealership that self-consumes most of its generation through showroom, workshop and charging load, export is a smaller part of the case than it is for a seasonal or weekend-heavy site. It still matters at quiet times, and you need a smart meter recording half-hourly export to claim it. Any MCS-certified install up to 5 MW is eligible.

How the routes stack

The reliefs are designed to work together rather than compete. A typical dealership project claims the AIA on the full installed cost, the Workplace Charging Scheme grant on the EV chargers within it, and then earns SEG income on exported power year after year. If your group is a large undertaking (250 or more UK employees, or turnover above €50m with a balance sheet above €43m) you are also caught by the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme, whose Phase 4 compliance notification is due by 5 December 2027. On-site solar is one of the most credible recommendations an ESOS audit can produce, so the same project that saves you money also helps you meet a separate legal obligation. Cold-storage or food-handling operations within a wider group may additionally qualify for Climate Change Agreement levy discounts, though most pure dealership operators do not.

Timelines, paperwork and common pitfalls

Tax relief is claimed through your normal corporation tax return, so the main thing to manage is the timing of the spend. The Workplace Charging Scheme runs through an approved installer and an online application, which is quick but must be filed before the March 2027 closure. The slowest item on any larger project is not a grant at all, it is the G99 grid connection, which can take 6 to 18 months on a constrained network, so we submit that application alongside the structural survey to start the clock immediately. The most common mistakes we see are treating solar as eligible for full expensing (it is not), missing the WCS deadline, and sizing a system for export income when self-consumption is where the value actually sits. We map the right combination of reliefs to your specific project and tell you honestly which ones apply to your business and which do not.