Static Caravan & Holiday Home Parks: Solar panels for caravan 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 objection we hear constantly 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 roughly doubled 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 auditable green story for guests at a time when Green Tourism awards increasingly influence bookings. 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 we size it

For a static caravan park we usually design a system 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. We never simply 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. We size to the peak-season daytime baseload of the loads that matter most, so the array 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. We feed the array into the park's private distribution network so it offsets everything you pay for as the operator, the pitch pillars, reception, shop, laundry, amenity blocks, pool and lighting, and you keep the saving or recover it through your 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. We assess both models and recommend the right ownership arrangement for your 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 typically in the region of 4 to 15p per kWh fixed in 2026, 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.

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 40 sockets and a maximum of £20,000 per applicant; daytime guest charging absorbs solar at near-100% self-consumption, so the two pair naturally. Finally, on-site solar is the auditable evidence behind a Green Tourism award, a measurable booking and pricing advantage. We model the funding route alongside the engineering so you see the real cash position, 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 we account for. On the wider compliance picture, rooftop PV on commercial park buildings generally falls under permitted development within size limits, 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 17 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 is recommended at intervals not exceeding three years under IET Guidance Note 3, and the SPF1981 v3 fire safety standard for rooftop PV is increasingly an insurer requirement.

How we approach this kind of project

We start with at least twelve months of half-hourly site meter data and overlay your occupancy calendar, then size for peak-season self-consumption rather than for a generic commercial profile. A full BS 7671 Section 708 condition survey of the site distribution is standard, so where pitch pillars, the amenity-block board or the incoming supply need bringing up to current standard, that work can usually be funded inside the same capital envelope as the PV, giving you one coordinated plan rather than two separate jobs. We submit the G99 grid application immediately after the survey to start the clock, because that is the longest lead item, and where export capacity is tight we can design for self-consumption only or add battery storage to compress the timeline. Every proposal is fixed-price, every install carries a 10-year insurance-backed workmanship warranty, and coastal parks get a salt-resistant specification as standard. We also schedule the disruptive work for your closed or quiet season so peak-season trading is untouched.

From contract to commissioning the process typically takes four to nine months, and the longest single item is the grid connection rather than the physical install, which is why we submit the G99 application immediately; the physical work itself is usually one to eight weeks depending on size. The only unavoidable outage is the final grid connection, a window of a few hours that we book for a low-occupancy period. Our certifications back the standard of work: MCS commercial certification for Smart Export Guarantee eligibility, NICEIC or NAPIT for the electrical work, RECC and TrustMark for consumer protection, and OZEV approval where guest or staff EV charging is added, which lets us bring the whole project, solar, site electrics and charging, under one accountable contract.

An illustrative example

As an illustrative composite based on typical UK caravan park projects, and not a real named client: a family-owned 320-pitch coastal park near the Cornish coast running an indoor heated pool, two amenity blocks, a clubhouse and a shop saw its site-wide electricity bill rise from around £62,000 to £121,000 in three years, with occupancy above 85% from April to October and near-empty in winter. A roughly 182 kW system of about 336 panels was installed across the pool building, clubhouse and amenity-block roofs, generating in the region of 165,000 kWh a year for an annual saving near £41,000 and a payback close to 5.6 years. In-season self-consumption sat around 84% on the pool plant and shower-block hot water, off-season surplus earned SEG income, the full cost was relieved in year one under the Annual Investment Allowance, and a salt-resistant coastal specification was used. The park went on to win Green Tourism Gold with solar as the headline evidence. The figures are illustrative and depend on your park, tariff, occupancy and roof.

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 request a free feasibility from your meter data, or read the holiday park solar FAQs first.