Specialist solar panels for schools in Vauxhall
25.6 percent of what a Vauxhall 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.
906 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 360 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 326,200 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Vauxhall- 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 Vauxhall models at 906 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,164 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Vauxhall models 2 percent above our mean. That is a real advantage, though a smaller one than the difference between an array matched to the timetable and one matched to the roof.
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 326,200 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 83,500 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.
Vauxhall ranks 20 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 Vauxhall schools
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for Vauxhall 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.
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 Vauxhall falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Vauxhall. 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 Vauxhall 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.
Across the country the arithmetic settles at roughly 49 percent of output on a session day, against about 71 percent for a weekday business. That figure hardly varies by location, which is why the local numbers that matter here are the yield, the roofs and what has already cleared planning nearby.
Inside the day it happens again. The roof is still at three quarters of its peak at four in the afternoon, by which time a Vauxhall school is largely empty, so the hours that look best on a generation chart are the worst on a consumption one.
That argues for a particular shape of scheme rather than against one. Size to the load that does not stop at the end of term, count in lettings, holiday clubs and summer works honestly rather than optimistically, and then decide whether storage or an export arrangement with UK Power Networks pays for the surplus that is left.
We set out the complete version of the term time arithmetic 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 | 38 | 20 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 73 | 49 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 105 | 42 | 63 |
| May | 17 | 120 | 66 | 54 |
| Jun | 21 | 124 | 87 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 126 | 45 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 106 | 0 | 106 |
| Sep | 20 | 83 | 55 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 52 | 29 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 22 | 11 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 905 | 442 | 463 |
Grid connection through UK Power Networks
Connections around Vauxhall 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 Lambeth
Lambeth has 90 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 32,746 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 61 primary, 16 secondary, 7 special and 6 further education, at an average of 364 pupils a site. 3.8 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 16 secondaries and the 6 further education sites.
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.
Send us the school postcode
Roof condition decides the order of works on most school estates, so that is where we start. Send us the postcode and a rough roof area, with twelve months of half hourly readings if you have them, and we come back with usable area, modelled output against your own load, and the funding routes.
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 Vauxhall trusts ask before a survey
- What would a 360 kWp array produce at a Vauxhall school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 906 kWh per kWp a year puts a 360 kWp array at around 326,200 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 Vauxhall?
- 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 Vauxhall?
- 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 Vauxhall?
- Lambeth has 90 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 32,746 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.