What is in this dataset?

One row per place: name, kind, ONS code, region, latitude, longitude, live postcode count, modelled annual output per kWp, national rank, and twelve monthly figures. 1,356 places in all — 995 towns in England and Wales, and all 361 UK local authority areas.

Can I use it commercially?

Yes. It is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, so commercial use, adaptation and redistribution are all permitted provided you credit solar.org.uk and PVGIS. No sign-up, no email address, no attribution-in-exchange-for-a-lead.

How were the figures produced?

For each place we took the mean centroid of its live postcodes from the ONS Postcode Directory, then ran PVGIS 5.3 PVcalc for 1 kWp of building-mounted crystalline silicon at 35 degrees facing south with 20% system losses. One model run per place, no interpolation.

Why is my town not in it?

Towns come from the ONS built-up area geography, which covers England and Wales, and we model the largest 1,000 by live postcode count. Scotland and Northern Ireland are covered at local authority level instead. If a place you need is missing, tell us — adding it is a script run.

Is the postcode count a population figure?

No, and it must not be used as one. It is the count of live postcodes in the area, which we used as a size proxy to decide which places to model. Postcode density varies with housing type and geography.

How accurate is a single centroid for a large area?

It is an approximation and the dataset says so. A dispersed local authority is represented by one coordinate and one model run. The variation within a large area can approach the variation between neighbouring areas.

Modelled solar yield for 1,356 UK places

One PVGIS run per place, at that place’s own postcode centroid: annual and monthly output per kWp for 995 towns and all 361 UK local authority areas. Free to download, free to reuse commercially, and reproducible from two scripts.

1,356 places, one model run each, openly licensed.

Annual and monthly output per kWp for 995 towns across England and Wales and all 361 UK local authority areas — modelled at each place’s own postcode centroid rather than interpolated from a handful of reference points.

The spread across the whole country is 696 to 1,074 kWh per kWp, a median of 908. That is a range of about 54% from worst to best, which is the most useful thing in the file: it is far less than most people assume, and far less than the penalty for facing a roof the wrong way.

Download

UK modelled solar yield by place

1,356 places — annual output, twelve monthly figures, centroid, region, ONS code and national rank.

Download the CSV · 147 kB · Download the JSON · 654 kB · CC BY 4.0

Credit as: solar.org.uk, modelled from PVGIS 5.3 (European Commission, Joint Research Centre). Contains ONS data licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Provenance, parameters and caveats travel inside the CSV as header comments, so the file still makes sense when it turns up in somebody’s downloads folder in two years.

Columns

Column	What it is
`place`	Name, from the ONS lookup
`kind`	`town` (built-up area) or `council` (local authority area)
`ons_code`	The ONS code, so you can join to other geography
`region`	Region or nation
`latitude`, `longitude`	The centroid we modelled at
`postcodes_live`	Count of live postcodes — a size proxy, not population
`kwh_per_kwp_per_year`	Modelled annual AC output per kWp
`rank`	Position in the national ranking, 1 being highest
`kwh_january` … `kwh_december`	Monthly output per kWp

How it was made

Geography. The ONS Postcode Directory gives a centroid for every live postcode. We group those by built-up area and by local authority and take the mean, which gives a centroid weighted towards where the addresses actually are rather than the middle of an administrative shape.

Modelling. One PVGIS 5.3 PVcalc run per place: 1 kWp, crystalline silicon, building-mounted, 20% system losses, 35 degrees, due south. The 20% matches the 0.8 factor MCS applies in MIS 3002, so these figures sit on the same footing as the 625-value dataset our calculators run on.

No interpolation. 1,356 places, 1,356 model runs. That is the expensive way to do it and the only way we could publish it honestly.

The whole national spread is 696 kWh per kWp — Na h-Eileanan Siar — to 1,074 in Polegate on the Sussex coast. About 54%.

For comparison, our orientation dataset puts a north-facing roof at a fraction of a south-facing one at the same location. Turning your roof round costs more than moving the length of the country.

Anyone using this file to argue that solar “doesn’t work up north” is reading it wrong, and we would rather say so in the dataset’s own documentation than let the number travel alone.

Why we can license this

Because we generated it. The model runs are ours, against a public API, and the geography underneath is ONS data under the Open Government Licence, which permits reuse with attribution.

That is the test we apply before publishing anything: did we generate it, or is it openly licensed? MCS’s own tables and the Energy Networks Association’s engineering recommendations both fail it, so we quote and link those rather than republishing them — the same reason there is no product database on this site.

If you use it

We would like to know, though nothing requires you to tell us. If you find an error, tell us — errors in a published dataset are worse than errors in prose, because they get copied.

Sources

PVGIS 5.3 European Commission, Joint Research Centre · Accessed 20 August 2026 One PVcalc run per place. Contains modified Joint Research Centre data.
ONS Postcode Directory and statistical geographies Office for National Statistics · Accessed 20 August 2026 · OGL v3.0 Postcode centroids grouped by built-up area and local authority; built-up area and local authority name lookups.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Last verified: 21 August 2026 How we research this Suggest a correction

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