Specialist solar panels for schools in Sutton
25.7 percent of what a Sutton school roof makes arrives in July and August, which is when the buildings are shut. A survey here starts with the covering and the structure, then the incoming supply, then what the timetable actually draws.
127,100 kWh a year, modelled for a 150 kWp array on roughly 446 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 Sutton- 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 Sutton models at 847 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,087 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Sutton sits 4 percent under our mean. Worth knowing, but not decisive: how well the array matches the timetable moves the answer further than the latitude does.
Scaled up, a 150 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 10 miles away at Stafford, models at about 127,100 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 446 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 32,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 5,800 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.
Sutton ranks 50 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 Sutton schools
Sutton 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 Sutton.
The closest recorded one is about 10 miles away at Stafford: Stafford Manor High School, Rising Brook, a 150 kWp roof mounted array applied for by eEnergy Group PLC, 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 Staffordshire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Sutton falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Sutton. July and August carry 25.7 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 4.6 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Sutton school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.6 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.6 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.
Put the two calendars together and roughly 49 percent of a school's generation nationally lands on a session day, against about 71 percent for a business open every weekday. That gap is the whole difference between appraising a school roof and appraising any other commercial one, and it barely moves from town to town.
Then there is the afternoon. From roughly three o'clock the building empties while the roof is still working, so a system sized on annual consumption will over-generate in exactly the hours nobody is there. We size on half hourly data for that reason.
None of that makes a Sutton scheme a bad one. It changes what the scheme should be: sized against the base load that runs whether or not the school is open, which on most sites is servers, comms, catering refrigeration, ventilation and hot water, with lettings, holiday clubs and summer works added on top. Where that base load is thin, the choices are storage, an export arrangement through UK Power Networks, or a smaller array that consumes nearly everything it makes.
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 | 21 | 14 | 7 |
| Feb | 15 | 36 | 19 | 17 |
| Mar | 21 | 69 | 47 | 22 |
| Apr | 12 | 100 | 40 | 60 |
| May | 17 | 117 | 64 | 53 |
| Jun | 21 | 117 | 82 | 35 |
| Jul | 11 | 118 | 42 | 76 |
| Aug | 0 | 100 | 0 | 100 |
| Sep | 20 | 78 | 52 | 26 |
| Oct | 17 | 47 | 26 | 21 |
| Nov | 21 | 27 | 19 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 18 | 9 | 9 |
| Year | 190 | 848 | 414 | 434 |
Grid connection through UK Power Networks
Connections around Sutton 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.
The school estate in Stafford
Stafford has 62 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 17,595 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 49 primary, 9 secondary and 4 special, at an average of 284 pupils a site. At 5.4 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 Stafford, 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.
Send us the school postcode
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.
What Sutton trusts ask before a survey
- What would a 150 kWp array produce at a Sutton school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 847 kWh per kWp a year puts a 150 kWp array at around 127,100 kWh, on roughly 446 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 Sutton?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.7 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 Sutton?
- 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 Sutton?
- Stafford has 62 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 17,595 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.