ABSOLAR: Building The Data Behind the UK’s Rooftop Solar Boom
Utilising modern technologies to efficiently and reliably map rooftop potential for solar generation, Absolar is ensuring capital is deployed in the right places. Whether private business or local authority, there is an untapped resource on UK rooftops, and Absolar is best placed to assist in turning that potential into realised results. Director Nic Cory tells Energy Focus more about the impressive growth of the company over the past seven years.
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Commercial rooftops across the UK remain sites of wasted potential, and for years the only way to find out whether a building was worth investing in was to send a surveyor up a ladder. Absolar was built to close that gap, replacing guesswork with geospatial data, and it has grown from a Southampton University spin-out into a business delivering solar, storage and smart energy systems for clients ranging from listed pavilions to county councils.
“We were born out of a frustration of the industry,” says Director Nic Cory. “A lot of people didn’t understand the potential that they had on their rooftop and they received conflicting advice or the barriers to obtaining good advice were large, having to get surveyors on site.” That frustration became the founding premise of the company: that remote sensing and earth observation data, applied properly, could tell a business owner more about their roof than a site visit ever could.
FOUNDED ON FRUSTRATION
The company’s roots lie in academia. “We come from research at Southampton University, understanding how remote sensing and earth observation information can give key information around how much solar can fit on a roof and how much power that can generate at any point in time,” Cory explains. That grounding shapes everything Absolar has built since: models that work down to the square metre, assessing every rooftop in the country for obstacles, shade, orientation and output.
The leadership blend behind that technology is deliberate. Cory brings a finance and property background, having spent his career looking for the best ways to solve two problems for businesses; firstly, energy security, and secondly, overcoming the complexity of investing in something on a rooftop with expectations of a return. Dr Phil Wu supplies the counterweight, as Cory explains: “He comes from an academic background and brings scientific rigour and R&D that is so important to us as we push boundaries and introduce new technologies around the assessment and hardware.”
Absolar started trading in 2019, just as the pandemic arrived. Commercial work stalled, so the business turned toward local authorities and residential decarbonisation instead, before returning to the commercial rooftops where it now does most of its work. “When commercial opportunities came back online, we went back into the commercial space where we think we can make a real difference.”
BUILT ON DATA
What makes Absolar distinctive is the discipline of its assessment process. The company’s models scan a roof remotely, cross-referencing structural condition, access, shading and orientation against cost and performance forecasts, all before a solar engineer ever needs to visit. Crucially, the system is built to say no as readily as it says yes. “We can quickly say whether a building is good for solar or not, and advise on where capital should be deployed,” Cory says. “It works across residential and commercial, but commercial is where we see the most economic performance. We have an installation arm that can then go out and deliver what we promise.”
That combination of remote assessment and in-house delivery is now supporting more than 5,000 UK businesses that have used Absolar’s scanning technology to check their buildings, with a live client base spanning warehouses, farms, offices, laboratories and public buildings across the UK.
PROVEN IN PROJECTS
Nowhere is that range better illustrated than on the roof of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, a Grade I listed modernist landmark where the original 1935 steelwork was never designed to carry a modern solar array. Rather than compromise the building, Absolar sourced 144 ultra-lightweight panels, weighing a third of a conventional module, allowing the 77.7kWp system to sit within the roof’s existing load limits while still generating around a fifth of the venue’s annual electricity needs. Wu described the brief as being treated “as much as an art project as an engineering one,” a solution chosen to respect nine decades of architectural history while securing the building’s energy future for the next.
Not every project is about heritage. In Lydd, Kent, Absolar delivered a solar, battery and smart energy system for Robowatch, a remote security and monitoring provider for whom uninterrupted power is not a convenience but an operational necessity. The 42.78kWp array, paired with over 54kWh of battery storage, now supplies 63% of the site’s energy demand and is expected to cut electricity bills by 48%, while a layered architecture of solar, battery and backup generator keeps monitoring systems running through any grid outage. Before installation could begin, Absolar’s own roofing team had to treat corrosion found during survey, a reminder that a system built to run for 25 years is only as good as the roof beneath it.
Community buildings have proved just as viable. St Francis Church in Southampton has been transformed from an energy consumer into what Absolar describes as a self-sufficient power hub, its solar and battery system storing daytime generation for use into the evening and providing backup power during outages, all housed in a discreet enclosure designed to sit comfortably within a residential setting. And in the public sector, Suffolk County Council’s Gipping Court building in Ipswich now runs a 49.5kWp array paired with battery storage, generating over 42,000kWh a year and cutting 9.8 tonnes of carbon annually, delivered with what Absolar calls seamless communication through the particular demands of a government client.
SCALING SUPPLY
Local authorities, Cory says, represent a distinct and growing part of the pipeline. “We are seeing a lot of spend coming from local councils. Private businesses have been investing for some time, but local authorities are going through a reinvestment phase having been early to the party while collecting feed-in tariffs. Now, they are busy retrofitting a lot of buildings across estates.” Suffolk is one example of that reinvestment in motion, alongside a growing volume of private sector work.
Supply chain relationships underpin the model. Absolar keeps installation entirely in-house rather than subcontracting, and has built partnerships to match. Through NatWest’s Sustainability Solutions arm, customers across the bank’s brands can access free remote surveys and asset finance that spreads panel costs against savings, making a project “cash positive from day one,” according to Cory. On the hardware side, Absolar has increasingly turned to GoodWe for inverters. “They are always on hand to make sure that things will work out from the planning stage through to commissioning,” Cory says. “We feel very supported by GoodWe.”
Geographically, the business operates from offices in Birmingham and Southampton, promising a four-hour response window to clients across the Midlands and south. “There is a lot of activity on the south coast, and we are at the heart of that so a push into the Midlands will support us,” Cory says, while the company’s academic arm is extending its reach further still, into European space-based research partnerships.
A NATIONAL OPPORTUNITY
Absolar’s growth mirrors a UK market entering a genuinely pivotal phase. Government’s Solar Roadmap sets out an ambition to almost triple national solar capacity, from just over 18 gigawatts today to 45 to 47 gigawatts by 2030, with commercial and industrial rooftops identified as one of the biggest untapped sources of that growth. Research commissioned by the UK Warehousing Association has found that the country’s largest warehouses alone offer 75 million square metres of roof space, capable of supporting around 15 gigawatts of solar capacity and cutting the sector’s electricity costs by as much as 80%. The planning cap that once required permission for rooftop installations above 1MW has already been removed, and Solar Energy UK has published guidance encouraging businesses across construction, manufacturing and engineering to see themselves as part of a supply chain that has never had more room to grow.
That is the backdrop against which Absolar is doubling revenue year on year, according to Cory, even as demand for solar rises and falls with the broader energy cycle. “There isn’t much an industry can do to stabilise demand,” he says, “but we have the academic arm of the business and the maintenance of both our systems and legacy systems for our clients, and that keeps us busy.”
PART OF THE TRANSITION
For a company that began as an answer to bad advice and inaccessible surveys, the ambition now stretches well beyond any single rooftop. “Our raison d’être and the mentality we have within the business is how can we use the best emerging technologies, whether that is AI computer vision or cyber security, to push what is more of a trade business and change it to become more tech savvy, allowing for more panels on rooftops quicker, where it should happen, and prevent it where it should not be happening,” Cory says. “We are a technology first and technology powered enterprise.”
With a national target that depends on unlocking millions of square metres of underused roof space, that combination of data-led caution and engineering delivery is precisely what the UK’s energy transition needs. Absolar’s growth suggests the market agrees.