The most consequential error in UK canopy guidance is a threshold. You will read that systems under 50 kWp need only a notification to the network operator, and that G99 applies above it. That is wrong, and it is wrong in the direction that costs you months.
This is the grid companion to our main guide on how a solar panel canopies installation runs.
The boundary is current, not capacity
The Energy Networks Association’s distributed generation connection guides split small generation by current per phase, not by kilowatts of panel. G98 covers installations up to 16 A per phase — approximately 3.68 kW on a standard single-phase supply and 11.04 kW on three-phase — and is a connect-and-notify route: you install, then tell the distribution network operator.
G99 covers everything above that, and requires the operator’s approval before the system is installed.
A canopy over a dozen bays is a few tens of kilowatts. Over a hundred bays it is several hundred. At roughly 1.7 kWp per standard bay, even a six-bay canopy is around 10 kWp and already outside G98 on a single-phase supply. There is no commercial canopy that falls inside G98. So any programme built on “we’ll notify afterwards” has the single longest item in the project sitting outside the plan.
For completeness: within G99, generation is classified by capacity, and essentially every car park canopy is Type A — the smallest band. That matters because Type A has the lightest technical requirements of the G99 types; it does not make it a notification.
What actually decides how long it takes
Four things, in rough order of impact.
Available capacity at the point of connection. This is the whole game. If the network can absorb your export at the existing connection, the application is an administrative exercise. If it cannot, you are into reinforcement — new cable, a transformer, occasionally a substation — which is a different order of cost and time, and the item most likely to stop a scheme outright. You cannot know which applies without asking.
Whether you are exporting or not. A canopy sized for on-site consumption with export limitation is a materially easier proposition than one sized to export. Export limitation devices are an accepted engineering solution and can turn a refused capacity position into a workable one — worth raising explicitly rather than waiting for the operator to suggest it.
Metering and the supply arrangement. Whose meter, what the existing supply capacity is, whether the site has one connection or several, and whether the landlord or tenant holds it. Multi-occupancy sites and leased estates generate most of the delay in this category, and it is all paperwork rather than engineering.
Your own sequencing. The application is free to submit and does not require a finished design — an indicative capacity and site details are enough to start. Teams routinely finish the structural design first and then apply, which adds the entire connection duration to the end of the project instead of running it alongside fabrication.
The one piece of advice that saves the most time
Submit the G99 application as soon as you have an indicative capacity, before you have chosen a supplier or settled the structure.
It costs nothing, it is reversible, and it converts the biggest unknown in the project into a known at the point where you can still act on the answer. If the capacity position comes back poor, you can resize the canopy, add export limitation, or stop — all of which are cheap decisions in month one and expensive ones in month six.
The corollary: treat any programme a supplier quotes before a connection application has been made as an estimate of the building work only. The construction phase of a canopy — foundations, steel, panels, electrical connection — is genuinely a few weeks to a couple of months. The project is longer, and the connection is usually why.
Questions worth asking the network operator
- What capacity is available at this point of connection for export, and for generation behind the meter?
- Would an export limitation scheme change that answer, and by how much?
- What reinforcement, if any, would this capacity require, and what is the indicative contribution?
- What is the current response timescale for a Type A application in this area?
- Is there any existing generation registered at this MPAN, and does it count against us?
Ask the operator directly rather than relying on a supplier’s summary. The answers are site-specific, they change as other projects in the area connect, and they are the foundation of a realistic programme.
Where this sits in the sequence
Consent runs in parallel, not in series. In England a canopy above off-street non-domestic parking can proceed under Class OA subject to prior approval, with the authority given 56 days to determine — see our solar carport planning permission page; Scotland has Class 9M, and solar canopies in Wales need a full application. Run the connection application and the consent route together, or the programme becomes the sum of them rather than the longer of the two.
Capacity itself you can work out before any of this, from the bay count: about 1.7 kWp per standard bay, derived on our solar carport page. That figure is all the connection application needs to get started.
Want the connection position established before you commit to a canopy size? Request a free feasibility assessment — it returns indicative capacity, modelled generation for your location, the consent route and the grid connection position by email.
Related: the grid line belongs in the tender specification; say who applies and who pays before prices are compared.