Specialist solar panels for schools in Kensington
A school roof in Kensington makes 5.7 times as much in July as it does in December, and the school year runs against that curve rather than with it. What we come back with is the usable roof area, the modelled output against your meter data, and the routes schools use to pay for it.
25.4% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 903 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 170 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 Kensington- 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.
School rooftop solar across Greater London
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Kensington models at 903 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,161 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 170 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 18 miles away at St Albans, models at about 153,500 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 505 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 39,000 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 8,100 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.
Kensington ranks 28 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.
What the planning record shows around Kensington
There is no school entry for Kensington 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 Kensington.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 18 miles from Kensington, at St Albans: 200 kWp at Samuel Ryder Academy, applicant Scholars Education Trust, which was withdrawn before determination. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Hertfordshire planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Kensington school
25.4 percent of the annual output modelled for Kensington arrives in the two months a school uses least (EU PVGIS v5.2). Term ends in the third week of July and the buildings stay largely empty until September. July is the single strongest month here at 13.8 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
The inverse holds at the other end. December and January together return only 5.3 percent of the year, and those are the months with the heating, the lighting and the full timetable all running at once. 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 Kensington 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 Kensington school has over that, and they are worth counting properly.
A Kensington 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 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 | 26 | 17 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 74 | 50 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 104 | 42 | 62 |
| May | 17 | 119 | 65 | 54 |
| Jun | 21 | 124 | 87 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 125 | 44 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 105 | 0 | 105 |
| Sep | 20 | 83 | 55 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 52 | 29 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 22 | 11 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 904 | 443 | 461 |
How many schools Kensington and Chelsea has
Kensington and Chelsea has 38 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 12,869 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 29 primary, 6 secondary, 2 special and 1 further education, at an average of 339 pupils a site. A ratio of 4.8 to one tells you where the roof area is. It is not with the 29 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
Connections around Kensington are handled by UK Power Networks, which sets the export limit for the site. Above 3.68 kW per phase the connection runs under G99, so the export limit is agreed in advance rather than assumed. Where the local network is constrained, an export-limited connection usually still makes the scheme work, because a school uses most of what the roof makes during the working day.
Start with the Kensington roof
We survey school and college roofs throughout Greater London. We need the postcode, a rough roof area and your half hourly meter data if the trust has it. From that we model what the roof carries, what it generates against the timetable, and which of the funding routes actually suits a school of your size.
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.
Questions governors ask us about Kensington schools
- What would a 170 kWp array produce at a Kensington school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 903 kWh per kWp a year puts a 170 kWp array at around 153,500 kWh, on roughly 505 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 Kensington?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.4 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 Kensington?
- 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 Kensington?
- Kensington and Chelsea has 38 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 12,869 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.