Commercial solar for holiday parks.

This page is for the operators behind holiday parks, caravan parks, camping and touring sites, and the amenity estate that serves them: the reception and shop, the toilet and shower blocks, the laundry, the bar and restaurant, and on the larger parks a pool or leisure wing. The buildings are spread across a site rather than stacked under one roof, and the demand they draw rises and falls with the season more sharply than almost any other commercial sector.

That seasonal swing is the whole story here. A holiday park is busiest across spring and summer, and that is precisely the stretch of the year when a rooftop array produces most. Most commercial buildings have to work to line their load up with generation, while a park gets a good part of that alignment from the calendar itself. The honest counterweight is the off-season, when occupancy drops away and the site draws very little, and that dip is exactly what the sizing and the storage decision have to be built around.

Solar earns most when the generation is used on site. A unit consumed offsets an expensive import unit, while a unit exported to the grid is paid far less, so the return tracks how well the array output lines up with demand. A holiday park gets an unusual head start on that match, because its demand peak is seasonal. Occupancy climbs through the school holidays and the summer weeks, and with it the shower blocks, the laundry, the catering, the pool plant and the reception load all run hardest, day after day, through the longest and brightest part of the year. Generation peaks in the same months. So across the season that matters most for the business, a high share of what the roof makes is consumed on site rather than spilled cheaply to export.

This is a different argument from a year-round building. A leisure centre or pool runs a heavy, continuous load every week of the year, including the dark winter months, so its case rests on steady all-year self-consumption. A hotel or conference venue rests on a base load that never really switches off. A park's case is the opposite shape: strong in season, thin out of it. That distinction drives the design. The honest caveat is the off-peak dip. When a park winds down for the winter, or runs a skeleton operation, daytime load falls and more of any generation would be exported. We do not paper over that. We model the real seasonal and half-hourly shape, size the array to the demand the park actually carries across the year, and look at whether battery storage to hold summer generation for the evening amenity peak, or a sensible export route for the quiet months, makes the better case than overbuilding a roof that would export cheaply off-season. Where a park runs a genuine year-round leisure or spa block, that part of the estate behaves more like the leisure profile, and we model it on its own terms.

A holiday park rarely presents as one large roof. The usable area is spread across the amenity estate: the reception and shop, the toilet and shower blocks, the bar and restaurant, the laundry, and any leisure or pool building, often as shallow-pitch or flat roofs with rooftop plant and ventilation to design around. Some parks also carry barn or storage roofs, and a few have land that suits a ground-mounted array. As an indicative orientation only, parks in this sector tend to fall in the region of 100 to 500 kWp once you account for amenity blocks, reception and any leisure buildings together. Treat that band as a sense of scale rather than a quote, and not a figure to plan around. The real size comes from the on-site drone survey and the PV*SOL model run against your actual half-hourly load, which for a seasonal site means designing to the demand you carry across the whole year rather than only the busy weeks. Where a park lands toward the middle of that range, the 200 to 300 kWp band sets out the roof area, connection and yield to expect.