Commercial Solar · Northumberland
Farm and commercial solar around Hexham
Three days a week, the livestock trade of the North Pennines and the Scottish Borders funnels through Tyne Green, where Hexham & Northern Marts — successor to auction businesses trading since 1901, on a purpose-built site since 1995 — has made this town the leading centre for beef-bred store cattle in the North of England. That is the honest starting point for a solar page about Hexham: this is a farm-trade capital, and around here agricultural buildings are not a niche we also serve — they are the main event.
The town itself is small — 11,341 people at the last census — and old: the Abbey has stood at its centre since about 674, and the streets around it hold the listed buildings you would expect of a repeat winner of Rightmove’s happiest-place-to-live index. But the working Hexham is bigger than the postcard: Egger’s panel plant on the edge of town, in Egger’s hands since 1984, is the largest manufacturing employer in Northumberland and makes around half of the UK’s chipboard.
And a quiet correction to the county map: Northumberland may be the far end of our patch, but Hexham is the exception — the A68 runs almost straight from our base near Bishop Auckland, about 37 road miles and under the hour on a normal day, making Hexham the nearest Northumberland town to us.
Solar on Hexham's commercial buildings
Start where the loads live: the steadings. Up the valleys — Tynedale, Allendale, the edge of the National Park, where livestock farming has shaped the landscape for centuries — the typical holding mixes old stone byres with modern steel-portal sheds, and it is the sheds that work: profiled sheet roofs, clamp-mounted arrays, no penetrations on most profiles. A 50 kWp array on a well-oriented shed returns roughly 40,000–47,500 kWh a year at local yields, shallow pitches at the lower end — set against ventilation fans, parlour or dairy equipment where it persists, water heating, workshops and the compressors that never quite switch off.
Two farm realities we design around rather than gloss over. First, hill-farm daytime loads are often modest — so we size to the meter, and if the honest answer is 15 kWp rather than 50, that is the quote you get. Second, rural supplies are frequently long, thin and single-phase in inconvenient places; pairing the array with battery storage can matter as much as the panels, and where the electrical infrastructure itself needs work before an inverter can land — old boards, tired wiring in sheds wired decades ago — that is the trade we started in.
Town-side, the mix is mart-adjacent trade, tourism and hospitality around the Abbey quarter, offices, and Egger’s industrial scale on the eastern edge. Hospitality and visitor businesses carry daytime- and weekend-heavy loads that track generation closely; the heritage core needs consent-aware design — a listed building requires listed building consent, and the workable answers are usually rear pitches, outbuildings and concealment-first layouts.
What Northumberland County Council is doing
Hexham is unusual among our towns in having climate policy at both tiers: Northumberland County Council carries the county targets — a carbon-dioxide-neutral organisation by 2030, county net-zero greenhouse gases by 2040 — and Hexham Town Council has published its own Net Zero Action Plan for the town. When the parish tier is writing decarbonisation plans, a commercial roof generating its own power is pushing on an open door.
Planning-wise the split is simple: farm sheds and estate roofs generally proceed under permitted development; the Abbey quarter’s listed stock goes the consent route; and larger arrays needing prior approval get their paperwork prepared by us, not left to you.
Local facts, sourced
Hexham in numbers
Every figure below comes from a named public source — the same standard we hold our savings estimates to.
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Hexham & Northern Marts at Tyne Green — trading through predecessor firms since 1901, on its purpose-built site since 1995 — is the leading centre for beef-bred store cattle in the North of England, with sales running Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Source: Hexham & Northern Marts — hexhammart.co.uk; Hexham Local History Society — hexhamhistorian.org
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Egger's Hexham plant — the company's first outside Austria, acquired in 1984 — is the largest manufacturing employer in Northumberland and produces around half of the UK's chipboard.
Source: Egger — egger.com/en/about-us/united-kingdom; Furniture Production — furnitureproduction.net
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Hexham topped Rightmove's Happy at Home index as the happiest place to live in Great Britain in 2021, regaining the title it first won in 2019.
Source: Rightmove press centre — rightmove.co.uk/press-centre
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Hexham Abbey has stood at the town's centre since about 674 AD — the heritage quarter around it is consent-first territory for any rooftop work.
Source: Hexham Abbey — hexhamabbey.org.uk
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Hexham Town Council has published its own Net Zero Action Plan — town-tier climate policy on top of the county's 2030/2040 targets.
Source: Hexham Town Council — hexhamtowncouncil.gov.uk; Northumberland County Council — northumberland.gov.uk/climate-change
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Hexham's parish population was 11,341 at Census 2021.
Source: ONS Census 2021 — hexham.parish.uk/census
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Hexham is about 37 road miles from our base via the A68 — the nearest Northumberland town to us, for all that it sits in the county's rural west.
Source: Measured road route (Google Maps), St Helen Auckland DL14 → Hexham NE46
Data last reviewed: July 2026
Our work across the North East
The next step
If your business trades through the mart, the tourist season or the timber gate, the first step is identical: a surveyed roof and a straight answer. See the wider Northumberland picture, or ask the firm an hour up the A68.
Hexham commercial solar questions
Our steading mixes old stone byres and modern sheds — what actually carries the panels?
The sheds, almost always. A steel portal frame under profiled sheet takes a clamp-mounted array cleanly; a stone byre with an old slate or corrugated roof usually should not carry one, structurally or economically. The good news is that the sheds are also where the loads are — fans, parlours, workshops — so putting the array where the engineering wants it and the byres where the swallows want them is usually the same decision.
Our farm's daytime load is small — is solar still worth it on a hill farm?
Sometimes, and we will tell you when it is not. If the daytime base load is a few kilowatts, a big array mostly exports at low value and pays back slowly — the honest design is small, matched to the meter, occasionally paired with storage where a critical load justifies it. A £15,000 system you use fully beats a £60,000 system you mostly give to the grid.
Do you genuinely cover Hexham from County Durham?
More easily than the map suggests. The A68 runs from our corner of County Durham almost straight to the Tyne at Corbridge — about 37 miles door to door, under the hour most days — so Hexham is actually the closest Northumberland town to our base. Surveys here slot into normal working days rather than special trips; installations are resident jobs either way.
Can the shops and offices around the Abbey fit solar at all?
Some can, with patience and the right roof. Listed buildings need listed building consent and a design that conceals — rear pitches, valley roofs, outbuildings — and we take that work on knowingly. Where a building suits panels badly, we will say so at the survey, at no cost.
Nearby
We also cover commercial solar in Morpeth, solar for Cramlington businesses and Blyth commercial solar installers.
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