Specialist solar panels for schools in Leatherhead
Mole Valley has 32 state-funded schools and colleges, and most of them are buying electricity in exactly the hours their own roofs could be making it. We start with the roof build up and the age of the covering, because across a school estate that is usually what decides which block goes first.
910 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 190 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 172,900 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Leatherhead- 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 for education buildings across Surrey
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Leatherhead models at 910 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,167 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Leatherhead models 3 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 190 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 13 miles away at Crawley, models at about 172,900 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 44,400 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 9,000 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.
Leatherhead ranks 3 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.
School solar on record near KT22
The KT22 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 Leatherhead.
Look 13 miles out and there is one: Oriel High School in Crawley, 190 kWp, applied for by West Sussex County Council, which is generating. None of our doing. It is a public planning record, and the nearest evidence available of how an application like yours is treated around here. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Term dates against the Leatherhead generation curve
A Leatherhead school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.7 percent of the modelled year lands in July and August alone (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the summer holiday takes roughly six of those nine weeks out of the timetable. July is the single strongest month here at 14 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 5.2 percent of the modelled year, and that is when the heating, the lighting and a full register are all drawing at the same time. 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. 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.
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.
None of that makes a Leatherhead 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 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 | 121 | 66 | 55 |
| Jun | 21 | 126 | 88 | 38 |
| Jul | 11 | 127 | 45 | 82 |
| 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 | 910 | 443 | 467 |
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).
Mole Valley schools, phase by phase
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.
Book a roof survey at your Leatherhead school
The first survey answers three questions at once: what the roofs carry, what they generate against your own timetable, and how a Leatherhead 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.
Leatherhead school solar, answered
- Is there enough sun around Leatherhead for this to be worth doing?
- The model gives 910 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 190 kWp array comes out at roughly 172,900 kWh a year before shading. It needs about 564 square metres of clear roof once walkways and rooflight setbacks are allowed for. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
- Does a Leatherhead school waste its generation in August?
- 25.7 percent of the modelled annual output for Leatherhead falls in July and August, when the buildings are closed for most of six weeks (EU PVGIS v5.2). It does not go to waste, but it only has three places to go: the base load that runs regardless, such as servers, catering refrigeration and ventilation; storage; or export under an agreement with UK Power Networks. We model all three against your half hourly data before an array is sized.
- Will the network around Leatherhead accept the export?
- UK Power Networks is the distribution network operator for Surrey. Anything above 3.68 kW per phase connects under G99, and the application fixes the export limit. On a school site the incoming supply is often the binding constraint rather than the roof, so we ask that question before anyone sizes an array.
- Is planning permission needed for panels on a school in Leatherhead?
- Usually permitted development covers a roof array on a school, with prior approval from Mole Valley needed above a capacity threshold. A ground mounted array in the grounds is a different question and much more likely to need a full application. We check both before design sign-off.
- How many schools are there around Leatherhead?
- 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.