Specialist solar panels for schools in Lewes
25.9 percent of what a Lewes school roof makes arrives in July and August, which is when the buildings are shut. 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.
1028 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 195,300 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Lewes- 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 Lewes models at 1,028 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,301 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 16 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, 18 miles away at Crawley, models at about 195,300 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 10,000 kWh across December and January. The July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.
Lewes ranks 2 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 Lewes
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the BN7 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 18 miles from Lewes, 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 Lewes school
25.9 percent of the annual output modelled for Lewes 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 14.1 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 5.1 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 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5 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 Lewes 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 Lewes 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 | 28 | 18 | 10 |
| Feb | 15 | 44 | 24 | 20 |
| Mar | 21 | 83 | 56 | 27 |
| Apr | 12 | 120 | 48 | 72 |
| May | 17 | 136 | 75 | 61 |
| Jun | 21 | 145 | 102 | 44 |
| Jul | 11 | 145 | 51 | 94 |
| Aug | 0 | 121 | 0 | 121 |
| Sep | 20 | 92 | 61 | 31 |
| Oct | 17 | 57 | 31 | 26 |
| Nov | 21 | 33 | 23 | 10 |
| Dec | 15 | 24 | 12 | 12 |
| Year | 190 | 1028 | 501 | 527 |
How many schools Lewes has
Lewes has 34 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 12,575 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 25 primary, 6 secondary, 2 special and 1 further education, at an average of 370 pupils a site. 4.2 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 6 secondaries and the 1 further education site.
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 Lewes 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 Lewes schools
- How much would a school roof near Lewes generate?
- Modelled at 1,028 kWh per kWp a year, a 190 kWp array on a Lewes school models at about 195,300 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 Lewes?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.9 percent of the Lewes 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.
- What does Lewes require for solar on a school building?
- Roof-mounted solar on a non-domestic building often falls within permitted development under Part 14 of the General Permitted Development Order, subject to limits on how far the panels stand proud of the roof plane and, above a threshold, to prior approval from Lewes on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Lewes before a design is finalised.
- How many schools are there around Lewes?
- Lewes has 34 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 12,575 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.