Specialist solar panels for schools in Eastbourne
What decides a solar scheme at a Eastbourne school is how much of the output the site uses itself, not how much the roof makes. 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.
1017 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 193,200 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Eastbourne- 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 Sussex
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Eastbourne models at 1,017 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,283 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is around 15 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, which is about as strong as a UK school roof gets.
Scaled up, a 190 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 30 miles away at Crawley, models at about 193,200 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 50,600 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 9,300 kWh across December and January. The July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.
Eastbourne ranks 3 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.
The planning position for Eastbourne schools
The BN22 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 Eastbourne.
The closest recorded one is about 30 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 Eastbourne falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Eastbourne. July and August carry 26.2 percent of the modelled output (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the site is closed for most of those nine weeks. June is the strongest single month here at 14.4 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 4.8 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Eastbourne school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.3 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.3 to one. 75 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 Eastbourne changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
The weekly pattern repeats the annual one. Saturdays and Sundays generate as well as any other day and consume almost nothing, so before storage or export is even discussed it is worth knowing what the site does at a weekend, which only half hourly data will tell you.
A Eastbourne 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 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 | 26 | 17 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 42 | 23 | 20 |
| Mar | 21 | 81 | 55 | 26 |
| Apr | 12 | 119 | 48 | 71 |
| May | 17 | 136 | 75 | 61 |
| Jun | 21 | 146 | 102 | 44 |
| Jul | 11 | 145 | 51 | 94 |
| Aug | 0 | 121 | 0 | 121 |
| Sep | 20 | 91 | 61 | 30 |
| Oct | 17 | 56 | 31 | 25 |
| Nov | 21 | 30 | 21 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 23 | 11 | 12 |
| Year | 190 | 1016 | 495 | 521 |
The school estate in Eastbourne
Eastbourne has 29 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 13,191 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 18 primary, 6 secondary, 4 special and 1 further education, at an average of 455 pupils a site. At 3 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 Eastbourne, 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.
Send us the school postcode
A survey in Eastbourne starts with three things from you. Give us the postcode, the approximate roof area and, if you can get it from your supplier, twelve months of half hourly readings. What comes back is a usable area figure per block, output modelled against your own load rather than an average, and the ways a Eastbourne school can pay for it.
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 Eastbourne trusts ask before a survey
- What would a 190 kWp array produce at a Eastbourne school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 1,017 kWh per kWp a year puts a 190 kWp array at around 193,200 kWh, on roughly 564 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 Eastbourne?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 26.2 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 your network operator.
- Do we need planning permission in Eastbourne?
- Often not, because panels on the roof of a school building usually sit within permitted development for non-domestic buildings. The exceptions are listed buildings, conservation areas and arrays that project too far above the roof plane, and larger schemes still need prior approval from Eastbourne. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Eastbourne?
- Eastbourne has 29 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 13,191 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.