Specialist solar panels for schools in Redhill
What decides a solar scheme at a Redhill school is how much of the output the site uses itself, not how much the roof makes. We arrange the roof survey, model the output against the school's own half hourly consumption, and set out the funding routes.
25.6% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 916 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 190 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 Redhill- 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 Redhill models at 916 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,175 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, 8 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 44,500 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.
Redhill ranks 1 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 RH1
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the RH1 postcode district 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.
Look 8 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 Redhill generation curve
A Redhill school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.6 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 13.9 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 5.1 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.
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 Redhill changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
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.
A Redhill 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 | 25 | 16 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 74 | 50 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 106 | 42 | 64 |
| May | 17 | 123 | 67 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 127 | 89 | 38 |
| Jul | 11 | 128 | 45 | 83 |
| Aug | 0 | 107 | 0 | 107 |
| Sep | 20 | 84 | 56 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 52 | 29 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 22 | 11 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 918 | 448 | 470 |
Reigate and Banstead schools, phase by phase
Reigate and Banstead has 46 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 20,341 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 35 primary, 7 secondary, 2 special and 2 further education, at an average of 442 pupils a site. 5 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 7 secondaries and the 2 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.
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).
Book a roof survey at your Redhill school
We survey school and college roofs throughout Surrey. 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.
Redhill school solar, answered
- Is there enough sun around Redhill for this to be worth doing?
- The model gives 916 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 190 kWp array comes out at roughly 174,000 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 Redhill school waste its generation in August?
- 25.6 percent of the modelled annual output for Redhill 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 Redhill 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 Redhill?
- Usually permitted development covers a roof array on a school, with prior approval from Reigate and Banstead 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 Redhill?
- Reigate and Banstead has 46 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 20,341 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.