Balcony Solar Output by UK City: 21 UK Cities Modelled

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A 0.8 kWp balcony solar panel kit mounted vertically and facing south generates roughly 480 to 660 kWh a year in the UK, depending on which city it’s in. Brighton is the strongest of the 21 cities in the table below and Inverness the weakest. Turning the same solar panels to face east or west costs about a third of the output.

Search for solar output by UK city and you’ll find maps of which councils have the most solar panels installed, plus general articles on what a solar panel produces somewhere in Britain. Neither answers the question a person standing on a balcony in Sheffield is asking: how much will this thing make, here?

So we modelled it. Every UK solar figure below comes from the European Commission’s PVGIS model, queried city by city, with the assumptions written out underneath. The assumptions matter more than the numbers. For a quick estimate against your own tariff, our balcony solar savings calculator does that job.

Annual solar panel output for an 800 VA kit, 21 UK cities

Modelled annual generation in kWh from 0.8 kWp of solar panels, sorted by the vertical south figure. Rounded to the nearest 5 kWh.

The last column isn’t a balcony scenario. It’s a 30° south-facing roof pitch, included because that’s the geometry behind the headline savings figure attached to plug-in solar, and it shows how far a railing sits from it.

Two things stand out. The spread across the UK is real but not dramatic: Brighton produces about 38% more solar energy than Inverness, and all 21 cities sit between 480 and 660 kWh. And orientation and tilt move the number more than geography does. A vertical east-facing balcony in Brighton makes less than a vertical south-facing one in Glasgow.

The method, in full

Every row came from one endpoint: the PVGIS PVcalc service, version 5.2, run on 16 August 2026.

• Radiation database: PVGIS-SARAH2, the default the API returned for these coordinates, with ERA5 as the meteorological source. It covers 2005 to 2020, so each figure is a long-run average, not any single year. Our north-facing balcony page models on the newer PVGIS-SARAH3 database (2005 to 2023), which returns figures roughly 1% lower for the same orientation. London vertical west is 405 kWh here and 399 kWh there. Both are correct for the database named; the difference is the database, not the maths.
• Peak power: 0.8 kWp of crystalline silicon solar modules, the PVGIS default. That’s the sensible DC pairing for an 800 VA microinverter, and roughly what kits sold as "800 W" carry.
• System loss: 14%, the PVGIS default. The documentation describes this as covering "losses in cables, power inverters, dirt (sometimes snow) on the modules".
• Mounting: free-standing, which PVGIS defines as modules on a rack with unobstructed air circulation behind them. A solar panel clamped to a railing has air behind it. One bolted flat to a wall doesn’t, and runs hotter.
• Tilt and azimuth: four geometries per city. 90° from horizontal, meaning vertical, at azimuth 0, -90 and 90, which in the PVGIS convention are south, east and west. Then 60° and 30°, both facing south.
• Horizon: left at the PVGIS default calculated horizon.
• Coordinates: city-centre latitude and longitude, one point per city. A suburb ten miles out will differ a little.

PVGIS also reports how far individual years stray from that mean. Across these 21 cities in the UK the standard deviation on the vertical south figure runs from 3.1% to 5.6% of annual output, so a good year and a bad year are around 10% apart before anything on your own balcony is counted.

Why the table models a vertical solar panel, not a roof

The reported government estimate for what a plug-in kit saves is £70 to £110 a year. The upper end of that range is modelled on a 30° south-facing installation, which is a roof pitch. Balconies aren’t roofs. A railing is vertical, and unless you fit an angled bracket, so is your panel.

That geometry costs you, and the model is consistent about how much. Across all 21 cities, a vertical south-facing array produces between 71% and 77% of what the same solar panels make at 30° south, averaging 74%. Apply that ratio to the government’s own top-of-range scenario and a vertical south balcony maps to somewhere near £80 rather than £110. An east or west railing lands below the bottom of the published range. That’s our arithmetic on their figure rather than one they’ve published, but it’s why this site keeps saying a balcony sits at the low end.

None of that makes a balcony solar installation pointless. The honest number is simply smaller than the brochure number, which is why we’d rather publish a table you can audit than one reassuring average.

What facing east or west costs you

On a vertical mount, east and west come out between 64% and 71% of south across every city in the set. That sits inside the 65% to 70% band in our guide to the best direction for balcony solar, which covers the intermediate compass points this page skips.

East against west is closer than people expect. East is ahead in 12 of the 21 cities and west in the other 9, and the gap is under 5% in 19 of the 21. Brighton has the widest split, about 6% in favour of west. None of it is enough to move a buying decision.

What can move a buying decision is when the electricity turns up. A west-facing solar panel produces into the late afternoon and early evening, which overlaps far better with cooking, laundry and coming home than an east-facing one peaking while the flat is empty. Raw kilowatt-hours understate west and flatter east.

Angling the panel out is the biggest lever you control

You can’t move Glasgow to Brighton. You can sometimes tilt the panel.

Across the 21 cities, the 60° south column averages 31% more annual generation than the vertical south column. That’s a bigger gain than anything geography offers across the UK, and usually the change most worth arguing for. A 60° bracket in Manchester (675 kWh) beats a flush-vertical railing in Brighton (660 kWh).

Whether you can do it is another matter. An angled panel projects outward, catches more wind and is far more visible from the street, all of which bear on what a landlord, freeholder or managing agent will accept. Our guide to mounting balcony solar panels covers brackets and fixings. Treat 60° as what’s available with permission, and vertical as the fallback.

A vertical balcony has a flatter year than a roof

Here’s the part that surprises people. A vertical south-facing solar panel is worse than a roof pitch over the year, but it isn’t worse in every month.

On this modelling, a 0.8 kWp vertical south array in London makes about 36 kWh in December against 50 kWh in June. The same solar panels at 30° make about 28 kWh in December and 100 kWh in June. So the vertical mount generates more in December than the roof pitch does, and about half as much in June. The same pattern appears in Manchester and Glasgow.

The physics is straightforward. In December the midday sun is very low, so it strikes a vertical south surface almost head-on and glances off a shallow roof. In June it’s high overhead, which suits the roof and skims the wall. December accounts for 6.0% of the annual total on a London vertical mount against 3.4% on the 30° pitch.

That doesn’t make winter good. Winter output is still low in absolute terms, and our guide to balcony solar in winter sets out the seasonal picture. It does mean a vertical balcony gives up less of its year to the dark months than rooftop solar panels do, which is worth knowing when your heating is running.

How these figures line up with our savings calculator

Our calculator uses PVGIS data too, but it models solar systems differently, so the two won’t always agree.

The calculator starts from a regional annual irradiance figure and multiplies it by separate factors for orientation, tilt and system performance. Those regional figures are horizontal-plane irradiation: 1,050 kWh/m² for London, where PVGIS returns 1,077 for a horizontal surface at London’s coordinates, and 880 for Scotland against 897 for Glasgow. This page instead asks PVGIS to model the tilted plane directly, so angle-of-incidence, spectral and temperature effects sit inside the model rather than in a flat multiplier.

For a vertical south-facing London balcony the two land close, around 580 kWh on the calculator against 595 here. They diverge on angled mounts, where the calculator’s flat performance ratio stacks on top of losses PVGIS has already applied, making it the more conservative of the two. Use the calculator with your own tariff and self-consumption rate; use this table when you want the geometry modelled explicitly.

Does an 800 VA cap ever clip an 800 VA kit?

The specification limits the device to 800 VA of AC output at up to 3.5 A, while permitting up to 2,000 W of DC solar panels behind the microinverter. So a fair question is whether the inverter throws output away on bright days.

PVcalc takes no inverter-rating parameter, so the table above is uncapped. To test it, we pulled a full year of hourly output for Brighton, the highest-yielding city in the set, at vertical south. Across all 8,784 hours of 2020, modelled output never averaged above 645 W in any hour. At 0.8 kWp on a vertical mount, the cap never binds.

It starts to bite as you raise DC solar capacity. On the same city, mount and year, 1.2 kWp loses about 0.6% of annual generation to an 800 W ceiling, 1.6 kWp about 5.8%, and 2.0 kWp about 14%. Overpanelling still nets more solar energy overall and is a reasonable way to lift winter output, but the returns taper. It also runs into limits on the number of solar modules, alongside the wattage cap: no more than 4 modules, no more than 2 in series, and open-circuit voltage at the inverter inputs no higher than 120 V DC. Our plug-in solar compliance checker runs a configuration against all of them.

Turning kilowatt-hours into pounds

Generation isn’t saving. Without an export tariff, only the units you use while they’re being produced come off your energy bills, and the rest goes to the grid unpaid. This site works on 60% self-consumption for a small solar panel system with no battery, and our self-consumption guide breaks that down by household type. A commuter household out all day achieves less. Someone at home all day achieves more.

Take London’s vertical south figure of 595 kWh. At 60% self-consumption that’s about 357 kWh actually displacing purchased units. At 25p per kWh, a round working rate you should swap for the one on your own bill, that comes to roughly £89 a year. The same solar panels facing west come out near £61. Neither figure is transformative, and both are enough to matter over the life of the kit. Set them against the cost of solar hardware in our balcony solar savings guide, which works through payback properly.

What the model can’t see from your balcony

PVGIS accounts for shadows from terrain. It uses ground elevation at a resolution of 3 arc-seconds, roughly 90 metres, which is fine for the Pennines and useless for the block of flats across the courtyard. Every figure here assumes a clear view in the direction the panel faces.

Real balconies subtract from that. A solid balustrade clipping the bottom of a panel. The building opposite. A tree in leaf from May to September. The balcony above yours cutting out the high summer sun. Partial shade costs more than the shaded fraction alone, because a shaded cell drags on the string it sits in.

So use this table as an upper bound. Find your nearest city, read the column matching the direction your railing faces, then take a chunk off for whatever blocks the view. Renewable energy on a shaded urban balcony is still a worthwhile energy source. It just isn’t worth planning your finances around a number the model can’t see.

Frequently asked questions

Which UK cities have the highest solar panel output?

Of the 21 cities in the UK modelled here, the top solar cities for balcony output are Brighton at about 660 kWh a year from a 0.8 kWp vertical south-facing array, then Plymouth at 625 and Southampton at 620. The south coast leads because it receives the most solar energy per square metre. Inverness is lowest in this set, at about 480 kWh.

How much does location affect solar panel output in the UK?

Less than most people assume. The gap between the best and worst city here is about 38%. Orientation matters more: facing a panel east or west instead of south costs roughly 29% to 36% wherever you install solar, and tilting a vertical panel out to 60° adds around 31% on average.

Do these figures apply to rooftop solar as well?

Only the last column, and only loosely. Solar power generation rises roughly in proportion to peak power, so a 4 kWp residential solar PV array is five times the 0.8 kWp modelled here, and a five-fold multiplier is the starting point before you adjust for shading and your actual roof pitch.

Why is Manchester lower than Newcastle?

Cloud, not latitude. PVGIS puts Manchester’s vertical south output at about 520 kWh against 570 for Newcastle upon Tyne, and the same gap appears between Glasgow and Edinburgh, which sit at almost identical latitudes. The cloudier western side of Britain does worse than the drier east.

My city isn’t in the table. What should I use?

Take the nearest city listed, or run the API call in the method section with your own coordinates. Differences over 30 or 40 miles are small next to what your balcony does to the figure.

Can I install solar panels on a balcony and get these numbers today?

Not yet. The plug-in route opens on 27 August 2026, and a kit also has to be verified compliant on the ENA register before it qualifies. Nothing is verified at the time of writing, so treat a balcony solar panel installation as planning input rather than a purchase.

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