Specialist solar panels for schools in Ilford
A kilowatt-peak on a Ilford school roof models at 909 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.
25.6% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 909 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 360 kWp, 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 Ilford- 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 Ilford models at 909 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,170 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 3 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, 20 miles away at Sevenoaks, models at about 327,200 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 83,800 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 17,000 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.
Ilford ranks 10 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 Ilford schools
Ilford and the area around it has no education solar entry in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. Almost no school array is large enough to be captured there reliably, so the absence tells you about the reporting threshold and very little about what is already on the roofs around Ilford.
The closest recorded one is about 20 miles away at Sevenoaks: The Sennocke Centre, High Street, a 360 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Sevenoaks School, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. We were not involved in it. We cite it because it is a public record of what has cleared planning in this part of Kent. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Ilford falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Ilford. July and August carry 25.6 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 Ilford 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.
Nationally this comes out at about 49 percent of annual generation falling on a session day. A business open every weekday sees roughly 71 percent. The 22 point gap is what a school appraisal has to absorb, and it is much the same in Ilford as anywhere else.
The daily curve does the same thing in miniature. Load drops sharply after about three o'clock, generation does not, so the last three hours of a summer afternoon are pushing into an empty building unless something absorbs them. Half hourly meter data is the only way to see how much.
The conclusion is not that a Ilford school should do nothing. It is that the array should be sized to the load that survives the holidays, which is usually the server room, the catering refrigeration, the ventilation and the hot water, plus whatever the site lets out over the summer. Anything above that line needs storage or an export agreement with UK Power Networks to earn its keep.
We set out the full treatment of the school year against 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 | 73 | 49 | 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 | 908 | 445 | 463 |
The school estate in Redbridge
Redbridge has 76 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 55,418 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 53 primary, 18 secondary and 5 special, at an average of 729 pupils a site. At 2.9 primaries to every secondary, most of the buildings here are small. That is not a reason to skip them, but it does mean the usable area on a primary is a hall roof and a teaching block rather than an estate.
For a trust with more than one site in Redbridge, the first survey is worth running across the whole estate. It tells you which roofs are near the end of their covering life, which have the switchboard headroom, and therefore which one should carry the first array.
Grid connection through UK Power Networks
UK Power Networks is the network operator here, and their answer on export capacity shapes the design. Any commercial array above 3.68 kW per phase connects under G99 rather than G98, and the application fixes what you are allowed to push back onto the network. If the local network is tight, limiting export rarely breaks the case here: most of the generation is consumed on site while the building is working.
Send us the school postcode
A survey in Ilford 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 Ilford 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.
What Ilford trusts ask before a survey
- What would a 360 kWp array produce at a Ilford school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 909 kWh per kWp a year puts a 360 kWp array at around 327,200 kWh, on roughly 1,069 square metres of roof. The value of that depends on your term time load. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
- What happens to the electricity during the summer holidays in Ilford?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.6 percent of the year is modelled to arrive in July and August here (EU PVGIS v5.2), against a site running on holiday base load. Lettings, holiday clubs and summer works take some of it, storage takes more, and the rest is an export question for UK Power Networks.
- Who do we apply to for export near Ilford?
- Only UK Power Networks can answer it for your connection. What we can say is that a capped export limit rarely breaks a school scheme, because the array that suits a school is sized to the term time load rather than to the roof.
- How many schools are there around Ilford?
- Redbridge has 76 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 55,418 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.