Specialist solar panels for schools in Havering
A kilowatt-peak on a Havering school roof models at 908 kWh a year, above the mean across the towns we cover, and the roofs it applies to are mostly carrying nothing. The survey records sheet type, remaining life, purlin spacing and the state of the incoming supply, and the model runs off your own meter data rather than an average.
263,300 kWh a year, modelled for a 290 kWp array on roughly 861 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 Havering- 1 teaching block
- 2 hall and kitchen
- 3 sports hall
- 4 1960s block, no array
- first phase
- later phase
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.
Solar PV for academy trusts across Greater London
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Havering models at 908 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,167 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 290 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 18 miles away at Bishop's Stortford, models at about 263,300 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 861 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 67,100 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 13,700 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.
Havering ranks 14 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.
The planning position for Havering schools
There is no school entry for Havering and the area around it in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. The register is dependable for anything from a megawatt upward and incomplete below it, and a school array is usually nearer a fifth of a megawatt, so this says more about the threshold than about Havering.
The closest recorded one is about 18 miles away at Bishop's Stortford: Hockerill Anglo European College, Dunmow Road, a 290 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Solar Options for Schools Limited, which is with the planning authority. We were not involved in it. We cite it because it is a public record of what has cleared planning in this part of Hertfordshire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Havering falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Havering. July and August carry 25.5 percent of the modelled output (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the site is closed for most of those nine weeks. July is the single strongest month here at 13.9 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 5.2 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Havering school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 5.7 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 4.8 to one. 73 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 Havering 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 Havering school has over that, and they are worth counting properly.
A Havering 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.
- generated while the school is open
- generated at a weekend or in the holidays
The same figures as a table
| Month | Session days | Output, kWh per kWp | School open | School closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | 20 | 25 | 16 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 74 | 50 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 105 | 42 | 63 |
| May | 17 | 120 | 66 | 54 |
| Jun | 21 | 125 | 88 | 38 |
| Jul | 11 | 126 | 45 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 106 | 0 | 106 |
| Sep | 20 | 84 | 56 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 52 | 29 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 22 | 11 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 909 | 446 | 463 |
The school estate in Havering
Havering has 82 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 42,937 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 59 primary, 18 secondary, 4 special and 1 further education, at an average of 524 pupils a site. A ratio of 3.3 to one tells you where the roof area is. It is not with the 59 primaries, which mostly offer a hall and a teaching block each, but with the larger sites that were built with a sports hall and a dining block attached.
Where a multi-academy trust holds several of those sites, surveying the estate in one pass beats taking a roof at a time. The design work, the connection applications and the procurement paperwork are the same job repeated, and a trust that runs them together gets a better answer on all three.
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.
Send us the school postcode
The first survey answers three questions at once: what the roofs carry, what they generate against your own timetable, and how a Havering school pays for it. Send the postcode, an approximate roof area per block and half hourly meter data if the school can get it from its supplier.
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.
What Havering trusts ask before a survey
- How much would a school roof near Havering generate?
- Modelled at 908 kWh per kWp a year, a 290 kWp array on a Havering school models at about 263,300 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 Havering?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.5 percent of the Havering 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 Havering 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 Havering?
- Havering has 82 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 42,937 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.