Specialist solar panels for schools in Brighton
Brighton and Hove has 63 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.
1015 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 192,900 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Brighton- 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 Sussex
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Brighton models at 1,015 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,293 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). At 15 percent above our mean, Brighton is at the strong end of the range, and a roof here earns more for every square metre than the same roof would further north.
Scaled up, a 190 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 20 miles away at Crawley, models at about 192,900 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 50,300 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 9,500 kWh across December and January. The July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.
Brighton ranks 4 of 10 towns we cover in Sussex on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 915 to 1028, a spread of 113 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 56,500 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.
School solar on record near Brighton
No school or college solar scheme appears in Brighton and the area around it in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. That is a reporting threshold rather than a verdict. The database records generating stations from one megawatt upward reliably and smaller ones patchily, and almost every school array is a fraction of that, so a roof full of panels on a Brighton secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.
Look 20 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 Brighton generation curve
A Brighton school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 26.1 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. June is the strongest single month here at 14.3 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.
Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 4.9 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 6.3 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.2 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.
And the week has the same hole in it. Two days in seven the site is closed altogether, at no cost to the generation, which is part of why the session day share sits where it does. Weekend lettings are the one lever a Brighton school has over that, and they are worth counting properly.
None of that makes a Brighton 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 the network operator, 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 | 27 | 17 | 10 |
| Feb | 15 | 42 | 23 | 20 |
| Mar | 21 | 81 | 55 | 26 |
| Apr | 12 | 119 | 48 | 71 |
| May | 17 | 135 | 74 | 61 |
| Jun | 21 | 145 | 102 | 44 |
| Jul | 11 | 145 | 51 | 94 |
| Aug | 0 | 120 | 0 | 120 |
| Sep | 20 | 91 | 61 | 30 |
| Oct | 17 | 55 | 30 | 25 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 23 | 11 | 12 |
| Year | 190 | 1014 | 494 | 520 |
Brighton and Hove schools, phase by phase
Brighton and Hove has 63 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 28,894 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 49 primary, 10 secondary, 2 special and 2 further education, at an average of 459 pupils a site. Read 4.9 primaries per secondary as a sequencing hint rather than a statistic. A primary is a single survey visit and a modest array; a secondary is several roofs of different ages on one site, and that is where both the area and the complications are.
A trust holding more than one of these sites should look at them together. Grouping the surveys turns the grid question, the funding question and the procurement route into one exercise rather than four, and it usually changes which roof goes first.
Book a roof survey at your Brighton school
The first survey answers three questions at once: what the roofs carry, what they generate against your own timetable, and how a Brighton 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.
Brighton school solar, answered
- How much would a school roof near Brighton generate?
- Modelled at 1,015 kWh per kWp a year, a 190 kWp array on a Brighton school models at about 192,900 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 Brighton?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 26.1 percent of the Brighton 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 your network operator, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
- How many schools are there around Brighton?
- Brighton and Hove has 63 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 28,894 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.