60.2 kWp Solar at St Michael's Hospice, Herefordshire

A nursing-sector installation, per Spirit Energy

St Michael’s Hospice near Hereford has provided palliative and respite care since 1984. It is a clinical, Registered-Nurse-staffed nursing facility, not a residential care site, which makes it one of the clearest published references for what rooftop solar does on a building with a continuous clinical load. We cite it here as a sourced sector reference point: the installation was carried out by Spirit Energy in March 2024, and every figure below is taken from Spirit Energy’s published case study rather than modelled on this site.

The system

• 60.2 kWp of solar PV: 140 Trina 440 W panels.
• 50 kW plus 10 kW Solis inverters.
• Installed March 2024 across the hospice’s year-round clinical buildings.

The reported outcome

• Generates around 49,000 kWh a year.
• Saves around £12,700 a year on electricity.
• Avoids more than 12 tonnes of CO2 a year.
• Roughly a five-year payback on the installer's published figures.
• The hospice also runs EV charge points for nurses carrying out home visits in electric vehicles, a good example of pairing solar with workplace charging.

Why it reads across to other nursing homes

A hospice with inpatient nursing registration carries the same kind of round-the-clock clinical baseload as a general or dementia nursing home: syringe drivers, pressure-relief systems, profiling beds and clinical refrigeration that draw power day and night. That is exactly the load profile that lets a nursing setting self-consume a high share of its own generation, consistent with the payback of about five years the installer reports; payback at any other site depends on its roof, tariff and self-consumption. It is also a reminder that many hospices are charity-owned and heritage-sensitive, so a survey-led design and, where relevant, gift-aided or restricted-fund capital are part of the picture.

Source (verify): Spirit Energy case study — St Michael’s Hospice 60.2 kWp. Figures are the installer’s current published figures; we cite them rather than restate them as our own. A real proposal for any home should be modelled from that home’s own half-hourly meter data.