Specialist solar panels for schools in Hastings
26.2 percent of what a Hastings school roof makes arrives in July and August, which is when the buildings are shut. We look at the roof, the switchboard and the timetable in that order, then set the array size against what the site draws in term time.
989 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 360 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 356,000 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Hastings- 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.
School rooftop solar across Sussex
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Hastings models at 989 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,272 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). At 12 percent above our mean, Hastings 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 360 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 32 miles away at Sevenoaks, models at about 356,000 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,069 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 93,300 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 17,400 kWh across December and January. The July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.
Hastings ranks 7 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.
What the planning record shows around Hastings
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the TN34 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.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 32 miles from Hastings, at Sevenoaks: 360 kWp at The Sennocke Centre, High Street, applicant Sevenoaks School, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Kent planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Hastings school
26.2 percent of the annual output modelled for Hastings arrives in the two months a school uses least (EU PVGIS v5.2). Term ends in the third week of July and the buildings stay largely empty until September. 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.
The inverse holds at the other end. December and January together return only 4.9 percent of the year, and those are the months with the heating, the lighting and the full timetable all running at once. The roof makes 6.1 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.1 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.
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.
Inside the day it happens again. The roof is still at three quarters of its peak at four in the afternoon, by which time a Hastings school is largely empty, so the hours that look best on a generation chart are the worst on a consumption one.
None of that makes a Hastings 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 | 25 | 16 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 41 | 22 | 19 |
| Mar | 21 | 78 | 53 | 25 |
| Apr | 12 | 116 | 46 | 70 |
| May | 17 | 132 | 72 | 60 |
| Jun | 21 | 141 | 99 | 42 |
| Jul | 11 | 141 | 50 | 91 |
| Aug | 0 | 118 | 0 | 118 |
| Sep | 20 | 90 | 60 | 30 |
| Oct | 17 | 55 | 30 | 25 |
| Nov | 21 | 29 | 20 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 23 | 11 | 12 |
| Year | 190 | 989 | 479 | 510 |
How many schools Hastings has
Hastings has 25 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 9,041 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 18 primary, 3 secondary and 4 special, at an average of 362 pupils a site. 6 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 3 secondaries.
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.
Start with the Hastings roof
Roof condition decides the order of works on most school estates, so that is where we start. Send us the postcode and a rough roof area, with twelve months of half hourly readings if you have them, and we come back with usable area, modelled output against your own load, and the funding routes.
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.
Questions governors ask us about Hastings schools
- Is there enough sun around Hastings for this to be worth doing?
- The model gives 989 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 360 kWp array comes out at roughly 356,000 kWh a year before shading. It needs about 1,069 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 Hastings school waste its generation in August?
- 26.2 percent of the modelled annual output for Hastings 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 your network operator. We model all three against your half hourly data before an array is sized.
- Is planning permission needed for panels on a school in Hastings?
- Usually permitted development covers a roof array on a school, with prior approval from Hastings 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 Hastings?
- Hastings has 25 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 9,041 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.