132 kWp for an Illustrative 130-Bed Nursing Home

An illustrative benchmark, not a real home

This is a modelled illustrative example, not a named nursing home and not a completed project. It shows how the clinical-load economics scale up to a large, purpose-built home. Every figure is a planning benchmark; a real installer proposal should be built from the home’s own twelve months of half-hourly meter data.

The scenario

A 130-bed purpose-built nursing home with a large flat-roof footprint, an annual electricity bill in the region of £110,000-£130,000, and a continuous clinical baseload: ceiling-track hoists, profiling beds, pressure-relief mattresses, oxygen concentrators, nurse-call, medication fridges, a commercial laundry and kitchen. The operator wants to cut cost, strengthen the CQC Well-led evidence base, and keep critical circuits live in an outage.

The illustrative design and numbers

• System size: 132 kWp (around 300 panels across the flat roof).
• Indicative cost: approximately £95,000-£105,000 at roughly £750 per kWp for a system of this size, before capital allowances.
• Annual generation: around 124,000 kWh.
• Self-consumption: modelled near 60%, given the 24/7 clinical load.
• Annual saving: roughly £22,000-£28,000 a year, mostly avoided grid import at an assumed tariff of around 27p/kWh in this illustrative example, plus a modest Smart Export Guarantee top-up.
• Simple payback: an indicative payback of about five years on this example's assumptions, not a quote, or nearer six with a battery added for nurse-call and medication-fridge resilience.
• Tax effect: as a tax-paying company, the operator could relieve most of the cost through the Annual Investment Allowance (100% up to £1m) and take the automatic business-rates exemption; the 20% VAT is generally not reclaimable by a provider of VAT-exempt care (VAT Notice 701/2 and 706).

Why it is labelled illustrative

We do not present modelled benchmarks as real installations. The point of this example is to show how the same clinical-baseload logic behind the 50-bed home's illustrative example (an indicative payback of about five years on that example's assumptions, not a quote) applies, at scale, to a large group-owned or complex home. The actual figures for any home depend on its roof, its load and its tax position, which is why a real proposal is modelled from meter data before any price is quoted. To see the cost method behind these numbers, read our cost guide, or send an enquiry about your own home.