Specialist solar panels for schools in Horsham
A school roof in Horsham makes 5.7 times as much in June as it does in December, and the school year runs against that curve rather than with it. What we come back with is the usable roof area, the modelled output against your meter data, and the routes schools use to pay for it.
177,700 kWh a year, modelled for a 190 kWp array on roughly 564 sqm of clear roof. That is 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 Horsham- 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 Horsham models at 935 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,201 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 6 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, 7 miles away at Crawley, models at about 177,700 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 45,300 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 9,200 kWh across December and January. The July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.
Horsham ranks 9 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 Horsham
There is no school entry for the RH12 postcode district in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. The register is dependable for anything from a megawatt upward and incomplete below it, and a school array is usually nearer a fifth of a megawatt, so this says more about the threshold than about Horsham.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 7 miles from Horsham, at Crawley: 190 kWp at Oriel High School, applicant West Sussex County Council, which is generating. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Sussex planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Horsham school
25.5 percent of the annual output modelled for Horsham 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 13.9 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 5.2 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 5.7 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 4.7 to one. 73 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.
Nationally this comes out at about 49 percent of annual generation falling on a session day. A business open every weekday sees roughly 71 percent. The 22 point gap is what a school appraisal has to absorb, and it is much the same in Horsham as anywhere else.
The same mismatch repeats every day. Peak generation lands between eleven and three, the timetable ends shortly after, and by four the site is down to caretaking and cleaning. An annual consumption figure cannot show that, which is why we ask for the half hourly data instead.
The conclusion is not that a Horsham school should do nothing. It is that the array should be sized to the load that survives the holidays, which is usually the server room, the catering refrigeration, the ventilation and the hot water, plus whatever the site lets out over the summer. Anything above that line needs storage or an export agreement with the network operator to earn its keep.
We set out the whole argument about term dates and 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 | 26 | 17 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 40 | 21 | 19 |
| Mar | 21 | 76 | 51 | 25 |
| Apr | 12 | 109 | 44 | 65 |
| May | 17 | 124 | 68 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 130 | 91 | 39 |
| Jul | 11 | 130 | 46 | 84 |
| Aug | 0 | 109 | 0 | 109 |
| Sep | 20 | 85 | 57 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 53 | 29 | 24 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 23 | 11 | 12 |
| Year | 190 | 936 | 457 | 479 |
How many schools Horsham has
Horsham has 52 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 18,878 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 44 primary, 6 secondary, 1 special and 1 further education, at an average of 363 pupils a site. A ratio of 7.3 to one tells you where the roof area is. It is not with the 44 primaries, which mostly offer a hall and a teaching block each, but with the larger sites that were built with a sports hall and a dining block attached.
Where a multi-academy trust holds several of those sites, surveying the estate in one pass beats taking a roof at a time. The design work, the connection applications and the procurement paperwork are the same job repeated, and a trust that runs them together gets a better answer on all three.
Start with the Horsham roof
We survey school and college roofs throughout Sussex. 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.
Questions governors ask us about Horsham schools
- Is there enough sun around Horsham for this to be worth doing?
- The model gives 935 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 190 kWp array comes out at roughly 177,700 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 Horsham school waste its generation in August?
- 25.5 percent of the modelled annual output for Horsham 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 Horsham?
- Usually permitted development covers a roof array on a school, with prior approval from Horsham 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 Horsham?
- Horsham has 52 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 18,878 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.