Specialist solar panels for schools in Dorking
A kilowatt-peak on a Dorking school roof models at 916 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.
174,000 kWh a year, modelled for a 190 kWp array on roughly 564 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 Dorking- 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 Surrey
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Dorking models at 916 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,174 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 190 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 10 miles away at Crawley, models at about 174,000 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 564 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 44,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 8,900 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.
Dorking ranks 2 of 10 towns we cover in Surrey on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 900 to 916, a spread of 16 kWh per kWp. Within Surrey that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
The planning position for Dorking schools
The RH4 postcode district 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 Dorking.
The closest recorded one is about 10 miles away at Crawley: Oriel High School, a 190 kWp roof mounted array applied for by West Sussex County Council, which is generating. We were not involved in it. We cite it because it is a public record of what has cleared planning in this part of Sussex. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Dorking falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Dorking. 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 14 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 5.1 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Dorking school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 5.8 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 4.9 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 Dorking changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
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.
A Dorking 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 | 106 | 42 | 64 |
| May | 17 | 121 | 66 | 55 |
| Jun | 21 | 127 | 89 | 38 |
| Jul | 11 | 128 | 45 | 83 |
| Aug | 0 | 107 | 0 | 107 |
| Sep | 20 | 83 | 55 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 52 | 29 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 22 | 11 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 915 | 446 | 469 |
The school estate in Mole Valley
Mole Valley has 32 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 10,539 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 24 primary, 4 secondary and 4 special, at an average of 329 pupils a site. At 6 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 Mole Valley, 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 operates the distribution network across Surrey, 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.
Across Surrey the planning database records 74 solar schemes totalling 182 MW, of which 6 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
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 Dorking 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 Dorking trusts ask before a survey
- How much would a school roof near Dorking generate?
- Modelled at 916 kWh per kWp a year, a 190 kWp array on a Dorking school models at about 174,000 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 Dorking?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.7 percent of the Dorking 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 Dorking school?
- Applications go to UK Power Networks, who run the network across Surrey. 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.
- What does Mole Valley require for solar on a school building?
- Roof-mounted solar on a non-domestic building often falls within permitted development under Part 14 of the General Permitted Development Order, subject to limits on how far the panels stand proud of the roof plane and, above a threshold, to prior approval from Mole Valley on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Mole Valley before a design is finalised.
- How many schools are there around Dorking?
- Mole Valley has 32 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 10,539 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.