Specialist solar panels for schools in Worthing
A kilowatt-peak on a Worthing school roof models at 999 kWh a year, above the mean across the towns we cover, and the roofs it applies to are mostly carrying nothing. 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.
25.9% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 999 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 350 kWp, 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 Worthing- 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 Worthing models at 999 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,273 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 13 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, which is about as strong as a UK school roof gets.
Scaled up, a 350 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 16 miles away at Chichester, models at about 349,700 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,040 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 90,600 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 17,100 kWh across December and January. The July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.
Worthing ranks 6 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 Worthing
The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for the BN13 postcode district. Read that as a gap in the record, not a gap in the roofs: the database is reliable above one megawatt and thin below it, and a school array is typically a fifth of a megawatt.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 16 miles from Worthing, at Chichester: 350 kWp at Chichester College, Westgate Fields, applicant Green Nation Solar Energy, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. 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 Worthing school
25.9 percent of the annual output modelled for Worthing 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 14.2 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 6.2 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.1 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 Worthing changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
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.
A Worthing 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 full treatment of the school year against 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 | 42 | 23 | 20 |
| Mar | 21 | 80 | 54 | 26 |
| Apr | 12 | 117 | 47 | 70 |
| May | 17 | 134 | 73 | 61 |
| Jun | 21 | 142 | 99 | 43 |
| Jul | 11 | 142 | 50 | 92 |
| Aug | 0 | 117 | 0 | 117 |
| Sep | 20 | 90 | 60 | 30 |
| Oct | 17 | 55 | 30 | 25 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 23 | 11 | 12 |
| Year | 190 | 999 | 486 | 513 |
How many schools Worthing has
Worthing has 29 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 15,005 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 21 primary, 6 secondary and 2 special, at an average of 517 pupils a site. That is 3.5 primaries for every secondary, which is the ratio that matters for a roof: a primary of a few hundred pupils usually offers a hall roof and one teaching block, while a secondary site carries a sports hall, a dining block and several flat roofs.
If your trust holds several of them, the sequencing question comes before the sizing question. Roof age, covering type and the state of the incoming supply vary block by block across an estate, and that is normally what sets the order of works.
Start with the Worthing 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 Worthing schools
- How much would a school roof near Worthing generate?
- Modelled at 999 kWh per kWp a year, a 350 kWp array on a Worthing school models at about 349,700 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 Worthing?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.9 percent of the Worthing 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 Worthing 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 Worthing on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Worthing before a design is finalised.
- How many schools are there around Worthing?
- Worthing has 29 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 15,005 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.