How much would a school roof near Bromley generate?

Modelled at 908 kWh per kWp a year, a 360 kWp array on a Bromley school models at about 326,900 kWh. What decides whether that is worth doing is how much of it the school uses itself, not the total. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.

How does the school year affect a solar scheme in Bromley?

It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.8 percent of the Bromley generating year lands in July and August (EU PVGIS v5.2), and a closed school still runs servers, comms, refrigeration and ventilation. What that base load does not absorb is either stored, exported under an agreement with UK Power Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.

Which network operator handles the connection at a Bromley school?

Applications go to UK Power Networks, who run the network across Greater London. An export-limited offer usually still works for a school, because the summer surplus is the part you were least likely to be paid much for anyway.

How many schools are there around Bromley?

Bromley has 100 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 52,652 pupils on roll. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools. We survey across the whole of that area, and where a trust holds several sites we look at them in one pass.

Specialist solar panels for schools in Bromley

What decides a solar scheme at a Bromley school is how much of the output the site uses itself, not how much the roof makes. We arrange the roof survey, model the output against the school's own half hourly consumption, and set out the funding routes.

326,900 kWh a year, modelled for a 360 kWp array on roughly 1,069 sqm of clear roof. That is the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.

Book a roof survey in Bromley

1 teaching block
2 hall and kitchen
3 sports hall
4 1960s block, no array
first phase
later phase

Drawing Illustrative estate, not a Bromley school

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 313,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / Greater London

Illustrative layout for an estate of this size. The array is drawn at about 345 kWp, roughly 53 percent of the 650 kWp these three roofs would hold, because a school sizes to the load it can use in term time rather than to the roof it has: generation it cannot use is exported at a much lower rate than it pays to import. The hatched block carries no array because its structure has not been assessed, which on a school of that era is the usual starting point rather than an exception. Your own figures, and which of your blocks can take an array, come from the roof survey.

Bromley / Greater London

A two storey 1970s school block with a shallow pitched roof covered in solar panels, empty playground in front and a playing field beyond — School buildings of the kind we survey across Greater London. Not a named school and not our work.

Solar for education buildings across Greater London

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Bromley models at 908 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,166 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is roughly 2 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, so latitude is working slightly in your favour here.

Scaled up, a 360 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 11 miles away at Sevenoaks, models at about 326,900 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,069 square metres of clear roof. We take the size from the nearest real application rather than a round number, so the example is anchored to something a planning officer has already seen.

Spread across the year that is about 84,300 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 16,700 kWh across December and January. UK Power Networks sets what may go back onto the network here, so the July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.

FIG. 1 Bromley against the rest of Greater London

Richmond910
Barking909
Ilford909
Battersea908
Bromley908
Chelsea908
Havering908
Wandsworth908
Bermondsey907

Bromley ranks 12 of 50 towns we cover in Greater London on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 847 to 987, a spread of 140 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 70,000 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.

Bars are zero based, so length is proportional to the figure. Where a county is flat, that is the finding: latitude is not the lever, the timetable is. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, modelled per town

School solar on record near Bromley

Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for Bromley and the area around it and nothing comes back under education. That is worth stating plainly and then setting aside: the register is built around generating stations, a school array is a fraction of the size it captures reliably, and plenty of school roofs never appear in any national record at all.

Look 11 miles out and there is one: The Sennocke Centre, High Street in Sevenoaks, 360 kWp, applied for by Sevenoaks School, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. None of our doing. It is a public planning record, and the nearest evidence available of how an application like yours is treated around here. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

Term dates against the Bromley generation curve

A Bromley school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.8 percent of the modelled year lands in July and August alone (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the summer holiday takes roughly six of those nine weeks out of the timetable. July is the single strongest month here at 14 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.

Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 5.1 percent of the modelled year, and that is when the heating, the lighting and a full register are all drawing at the same time. The roof makes 5.8 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 4.9 to one. 74 percent of the year arrives between April and September, and the point of that figure is not that the summer half goes unused, because April, May and June are full teaching months that draw hard. It is that the concentration peaks in the few weeks at the end of it when the building is shut.

Summed over the year, about 49 percent of what a school roof makes arrives while the school is open. For a business trading every weekday the equivalent is roughly 71 percent. Nothing about Bromley changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.

And the week has the same hole in it. Two days in seven the site is closed altogether, at no cost to the generation, which is part of why the session day share sits where it does. Weekend lettings are the one lever a Bromley school has over that, and they are worth counting properly.

A Bromley governing body should read that as a sizing constraint, not a reason to stop. The base load that runs through the holidays, servers, comms, refrigeration, ventilation and hot water, is the floor the array should be built up from, and everything above it has to be justified by storage, export or summer occupancy.

We set out the whole argument about term dates and the generation curve on the home page, and what it does to a payback figure under costs.

FIG. 2 A Bromley roof against the English school year

generated while the school is open
generated at a weekend or in the holidays

The same figures as a table

Monthly output for a 1 kWp array in Bromley, split by whether the day is a school session day. Across the year 49 percent of generation lands while the school is open.
Month	Session days	Output, kWh per kWp	School open	School closed
Jan	20	24	15	9
Feb	15	37	20	17
Mar	21	72	49	23
Apr	12	105	42	63
May	17	121	66	55
Jun	21	125	88	38
Jul	11	127	45	82
Aug	0	107	0	107
Sep	20	84	56	28
Oct	17	52	29	23
Nov	21	31	22	9
Dec	15	22	11	11
Year	190	907	443	464

Per kWp installed, month by month, separating generation while the school is open from generation at a weekend or in the holidays. 74 percent of the Bromley year sits between April and September, most of which is term time; it is the tail of that period, the last week of July and all of August, that the school is not there for. The daily split is a flat apportionment of each month, not a metered one. Session days follow a typical English school year of 190 days. Your own trust or authority may differ by a few days either way. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, session days from a typical school calendar

Bromley schools, phase by phase

Bromley has 100 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 52,652 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 76 primary, 19 secondary, 4 special and 1 further education, at an average of 527 pupils a site. 4 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 19 secondaries and the 1 further education site.

Across an estate of that size the roofs will not be in the same condition, and that is the point of surveying them together: the block with the best orientation is often not the block whose covering has twenty years left in it.

Aerial view of a school site with teaching blocks of several different ages, a sports hall and a playing field, solar arrays on two of the flat roofs — A school site with blocks of several ages, which is the usual starting point for a trust estate survey.

Grid connection through UK Power Networks

UK Power Networks operates the distribution network across Greater London, so the export application goes to them. Anything larger than 3.68 kW per phase falls under G99, which means an application before commissioning rather than a notification afterwards. A constrained network is not the end of a scheme. Capping export costs little when the building already absorbs most of what the roof produces.

Book the survey

Book a roof survey at your Bromley school

A survey in Bromley starts with three things from you. Give us the postcode, the approximate roof area and, if you can get it from your supplier, twelve months of half hourly readings. What comes back is a usable area figure per block, output modelled against your own load rather than an average, and the ways a Bromley school can pay for it.

Lenzie Consulting Ltd arranges the survey and passes your details to an MCS-certified installation partner so they can quote. We do not carry out the installation ourselves.

Bromley school solar, answered

How much would a school roof near Bromley generate?: Modelled at 908 kWh per kWp a year, a 360 kWp array on a Bromley school models at about 326,900 kWh. What decides whether that is worth doing is how much of it the school uses itself, not the total. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
How does the school year affect a solar scheme in Bromley?: It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.8 percent of the Bromley generating year lands in July and August (EU PVGIS v5.2), and a closed school still runs servers, comms, refrigeration and ventilation. What that base load does not absorb is either stored, exported under an agreement with UK Power Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
Which network operator handles the connection at a Bromley school?: Applications go to UK Power Networks, who run the network across Greater London. An export-limited offer usually still works for a school, because the summer surplus is the part you were least likely to be paid much for anyway.
How many schools are there around Bromley?: Bromley has 100 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 52,652 pupils on roll. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools. We survey across the whole of that area, and where a trust holds several sites we look at them in one pass.

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