Solar Panels for Static Caravan and Holiday Home Parks

Why solar panels for caravan parks make commercial sense, despite the seasonal trade

A static caravan and holiday home park is one of the strongest commercial roofs for solar in the UK leisure sector, and the reason is the very thing owners worry about most: the seasonal trade. The common objection is that demand is all in summer, so the panels will sit idle for half the year. In fact that pattern is what makes solar panels for caravan parks pay rather than the other way around. Your highest-value loads, the amenity blocks and shower facilities, reception, shop, laundry, site lighting and the pitch pillars themselves, all peak in the same April to October window when the panels generate the most. In-season self-consumption is naturally very high, so the electricity your array makes is used on the park rather than exported cheaply, and self-consumption is the single biggest driver of solar payback.

Energy is now one of the largest controllable costs on a park after staffing, and on most sites the site-wide bill has risen sharply since 2021. Pitch margins are already thin, and the standing charges, frost protection and reception running costs do not stop in the off-season even when income falls close to zero. Solar fixes a large slice of that bill for two decades from a single investment, and it gives the park an on-site generation record it can cite in a Green Tourism application. A well-sized array on a caravan park is one of the most defensible commercial cases in the whole leisure field.

There is also a growing reason to act now rather than later, and that is guest EV charging. A large share of parks already offer it, and guests increasingly expect to charge while they stay. Grid-supplied charging is expensive and can overload ageing site infrastructure, but pairing chargepoints with on-site solar absorbs daytime generation at close to 100% self-consumption. Adding battery storage lets you charge cars from stored solar into the evening peak without overloading your DNO supply, often deferring an expensive grid upgrade. So a solar project on a caravan park is rarely just about the existing bill; it also quietly unlocks the EV charging that bookings will increasingly demand.

What a typical install looks like and how it is sized

For a static caravan park a system is usually designed in the 50 to 500 kW range, which is roughly 90 to 920 panels spread across about 300 to 3,000 square metres of roof, typically the amenity blocks, reception, shop and any leisure building, with static-caravan roofs hosting micro-arrays where ground or roof space is tight. A system that size generates in the region of 45,000 to 460,000 kWh a year and saves somewhere between 10 and 106 tonnes of CO2 annually. The aim is never simply to fill the roof. Sizing starts from at least twelve months of half-hourly site meter data overlaid on your occupancy calendar, because a coastal park running 80% occupancy in August and 5% in January has a load curve nothing like a year-round business. The array is sized to the peak-season daytime baseload of the loads that matter most, so it is consumed on site when the park is full, and the off-season surplus exports under the Smart Export Guarantee. The amenity blocks and reception usually have the best unshaded roofs and carry the steadiest summer baseload, so they tend to anchor the design.

A question almost every owner asks is whether to put panels on each caravan or on the park as a whole. The answer is almost always site-wide rather than per-van. The array is fed into the park's private distribution network so it offsets everything the operator pays for, the pitch pillars, reception, shop, laundry, amenity blocks, pool and lighting, and the operator keeps the saving or recovers it through pitch electricity charges. Per-unit micro-arrays only make sense for genuinely off-grid pods or where there is no shared roof or ground space at all. Where roof space is short, discreet ground-mount between pitches can make up the shortfall, subject to planning. Both models should be assessed to find the right ownership arrangement for the park.

Costs, payback and tax relief

A single static caravan park project typically lands between £45,000 and £450,000 fully installed depending on size and roof area, with a simple payback near 6 years and the electricity effectively free for the fifteen to twenty plus years after that. The biggest financial lever is tax. Solar PV, inverters, mounting and battery storage qualify as plant and machinery, so the 100% Annual Investment Allowance lets most park businesses write off the full cost against profit in year one, up to the annual cap, worth up to a quarter of the project value back as tax saved for a limited company. One point that catches owners out: solar is a special-rate asset, so it is not eligible for full expensing, but the 100% AIA covers it, and almost every single-park install sits within the cap. The Smart Export Guarantee matters more here than in a year-round business because parks export significantly through the quiet October to March months, earning income on power you would not have used anyway. SEG export tariffs are around 12-13p per kWh for the better open fixed rates in October 2026, with small suppliers paying 3-6p, and because the tariff is set by each supplier it is worth shopping around. Cost per kW is typically around £750 to £950 for systems above 100 kW, falling toward £600 per kW above 1 MW. One caveat worth knowing early: the 0% VAT relief on solar applies to residential and charity buildings only, not to commercial park operations, which is why the Annual Investment Allowance does the heavy lifting here. Our cost guide sets out worked numbers for different park sizes, and the funding page covers export tariffs in detail. How a short season changes the arithmetic is covered in the guide to caravan park solar payback. These cost and payback figures are illustrative estimates, not quotes.

Funding routes in detail

Few parks fund a solar install from cash, and they do not need to. The 100% Annual Investment Allowance is the foundation, giving up to a 25% effective tax saving in year one on solar, inverters, mounting and storage. Beyond that, a power purchase agreement (PPA) delivers day-one savings against your current tariff with zero capital outlay, which suits seasonal cash flow where peak income arrives in summer and reserves are precious. Asset finance is the other common route, spreading the cost over a typical term and usually running EBITDA-positive from year one. If you want to offer guest or staff EV charging alongside the solar, the Workplace Charging Scheme from OZEV funds up to 75% of chargepoint cost, capped at £500 per socket from 1 April 2026, up to a maximum of 40 sockets per applicant across all sites, and the scheme closes on 31 March 2027; daytime guest charging absorbs solar at near-100% self-consumption, so the two pair naturally. Green Tourism is a certification scheme, not a grant; on-site solar can count as evidence in an application, so check the scheme's current criteria. The funding route should be modelled alongside the engineering so the real cash position shows, not just a headline cost.

Compliance and sector considerations

The defining compliance point for a caravan park is the site distribution itself. It must comply with BS 7671 Section 708, the standard for electrical installations in caravan and camping parks, with pitch socket-outlets to BS EN 60309-2, IP44 rated, at least 16A and with RCD protection. Solar feeds into the park's private distribution network, not into individual vans, which is exactly why the site-wide metering model works. Where the park has Park Homes or residential pitches on a mixed site, those have separate consumer protections that have to be accounted for. On the wider compliance picture, rooftop PV on commercial park buildings generally falls under permitted development in England under Class J of Part 14 (above 50 kW, the council's prior approval of design and appearance applies; Wales and Scotland have their own rules), with greater scrutiny in AONBs, National Parks, conservation areas and coastal settings where roof-mount is strongly preferred. A G99 grid application is required for connections above 16 A (3.68 kW) per phase, and rural and coastal parks are frequently on capacity-constrained DNO networks, so a connection study is essential before final sizing. Periodic inspection of the park installation should follow the intervals set out in IET Guidance Note 3 and the inspector's last report. The trade-offs between roof and field are covered in rooftop vs ground mounted solar caravan parks.

If your park also runs lodges, glamping or a touring field, our pages on solar for lodge and glamping parks and solar for park leisure buildings may also apply. When you are ready, read the cost guide and funding routes, then send an enquiry from your meter data, or read the holiday park solar FAQs first.