How much would a school roof near Reading generate?

Modelled at 907 kWh per kWp a year, a 250 kWp array on a Reading school models at about 226,800 kWh. What decides whether that is worth doing is how much of it the school uses itself, not the total. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.

How does the school year affect a solar scheme in Reading?

It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.4 percent of the Reading generating year lands in July and August (EU PVGIS v5.2), and a closed school still runs servers, comms, refrigeration and ventilation. What that base load does not absorb is either stored, exported under an agreement with Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.

Which network operator handles the connection at a Reading school?

Applications go to Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, who run the network across Berkshire. An export-limited offer usually still works for a school, because the summer surplus is the part you were least likely to be paid much for anyway.

What does Reading require for solar on a school building?

Roof-mounted solar on a non-domestic building often falls within permitted development under Part 14 of the General Permitted Development Order, subject to limits on how far the panels stand proud of the roof plane and, above a threshold, to prior approval from Reading on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Reading before a design is finalised.

How many schools are there around Reading?

Reading has 61 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 24,669 pupils on roll. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools. We survey across the whole of that area, and where a trust holds several sites we look at them in one pass.

Specialist solar panels for schools in Reading

What decides a solar scheme at a Reading school is how much of the output the site uses itself, not how much the roof makes. We arrange the roof survey, model the output against the school's own half hourly consumption, and set out the funding routes.

226,800 kWh a year, modelled for a 250 kWp array on roughly 743 sqm of clear roof. That is the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.

Book a roof survey in Reading

1 teaching block
2 hall and kitchen
3 sports hall
4 1960s block, no array
first phase
later phase

Drawing Illustrative estate, not a Reading school

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 313,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / RG2

Illustrative layout for an estate of this size. The array is drawn at about 345 kWp, roughly 53 percent of the 650 kWp these three roofs would hold, because a school sizes to the load it can use in term time rather than to the roof it has: generation it cannot use is exported at a much lower rate than it pays to import. The hatched block carries no array because its structure has not been assessed, which on a school of that era is the usual starting point rather than an exception. Your own figures, and which of your blocks can take an array, come from the roof survey.

Reading / Berkshire

A school on the edge of a Home Counties town, solar arrays on its roofs and wooded low hills beyond — School buildings of the kind we survey across South East. Not a named school and not our work.

Solar for education buildings across Berkshire

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Reading models at 907 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,163 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is roughly 2 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, so latitude is working slightly in your favour here.

Scaled up, a 250 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 11 miles away at Maidenhead, models at about 226,800 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 743 square metres of clear roof. We take the size from the nearest real application rather than a round number, so the example is anchored to something a planning officer has already seen.

Spread across the year that is about 57,600 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 12,000 kWh across December and January. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks sets what may go back onto the network here, so the July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.

FIG. 1 Reading against the rest of Berkshire

Thatcham910
Reading907
Maidenhead905
Newbury904
Slough903
Windsor901
Wokingham898
Bracknell891

Reading ranks 2 of 8 towns we cover in Berkshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 891 to 910, a spread of 19 kWh per kWp. Within Berkshire that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.

Bars are zero based, so length is proportional to the figure. Where a county is flat, that is the finding: latitude is not the lever, the timetable is. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, modelled per town

School solar on record near RG2

There is no school entry for the RG2 postcode district in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. The register is dependable for anything from a megawatt upward and incomplete below it, and a school array is usually nearer a fifth of a megawatt, so this says more about the threshold than about Reading.

Look 11 miles out and there is one: Furze Platt Senior School, Furze Platt Road in Maidenhead, 250 kWp, applied for by Furze Platt Senior School, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. None of our doing. It is a public planning record, and the nearest evidence available of how an application like yours is treated around here. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

Term dates against the Reading generation curve

A Reading school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.4 percent of the modelled year lands in July and August alone (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the summer holiday takes roughly six of those nine weeks out of the timetable. June is the strongest single month here at 13.8 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.

Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 5.3 percent of the modelled year, and that is when the heating, the lighting and a full register are all drawing at the same time. The roof makes 5.7 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 4.8 to one. 73 percent of the year arrives between April and September, and the point of that figure is not that the summer half goes unused, because April, May and June are full teaching months that draw hard. It is that the concentration peaks in the few weeks at the end of it when the building is shut.

Summed over the year, about 49 percent of what a school roof makes arrives while the school is open. For a business trading every weekday the equivalent is roughly 71 percent. Nothing about Reading changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.

Inside the day it happens again. The roof is still at three quarters of its peak at four in the afternoon, by which time a Reading school is largely empty, so the hours that look best on a generation chart are the worst on a consumption one.

A Reading governing body should read that as a sizing constraint, not a reason to stop. The base load that runs through the holidays, servers, comms, refrigeration, ventilation and hot water, is the floor the array should be built up from, and everything above it has to be justified by storage, export or summer occupancy.

We set out the whole argument about term dates and the generation curve on the home page, and what it does to a payback figure under costs.

FIG. 2 A Reading roof against the English school year

generated while the school is open
generated at a weekend or in the holidays

The same figures as a table

Monthly output for a 1 kWp array in Reading, split by whether the day is a school session day. Across the year 49 percent of generation lands while the school is open.
Month	Session days	Output, kWh per kWp	School open	School closed
Jan	20	26	17	9
Feb	15	39	21	18
Mar	21	74	50	24
Apr	12	105	42	63
May	17	121	66	55
Jun	21	125	88	38
Jul	11	125	44	81
Aug	0	106	0	106
Sep	20	83	55	28
Oct	17	51	28	23
Nov	21	31	22	9
Dec	15	22	11	11
Year	190	908	444	464

Per kWp installed, month by month, separating generation while the school is open from generation at a weekend or in the holidays. 73 percent of the Reading year sits between April and September, most of which is term time; it is the tail of that period, the last week of July and all of August, that the school is not there for. The daily split is a flat apportionment of each month, not a metered one. Session days follow a typical English school year of 190 days. Your own trust or authority may differ by a few days either way. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, session days from a typical school calendar

Reading schools, phase by phase

Reading has 61 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 24,669 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 46 primary, 11 secondary and 4 special, at an average of 404 pupils a site. A ratio of 4.2 to one tells you where the roof area is. It is not with the 46 primaries, which mostly offer a hall and a teaching block each, but with the larger sites that were built with a sports hall and a dining block attached.

Where a multi-academy trust holds several of those sites, surveying the estate in one pass beats taking a roof at a time. The design work, the connection applications and the procurement paperwork are the same job repeated, and a trust that runs them together gets a better answer on all three.

Aerial view of a school site with teaching blocks of several different ages, a sports hall and a playing field, solar arrays on two of the flat roofs — A school site with blocks of several ages, which is the usual starting point for a trust estate survey.

Grid connection through Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks

Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks is the network operator here, and their answer on export capacity shapes the design. Any commercial array above 3.68 kW per phase connects under G99 rather than G98, and the application fixes what you are allowed to push back onto the network. If the local network is tight, limiting export rarely breaks the case here: most of the generation is consumed on site while the building is working.

Across Berkshire the planning database records 83 solar schemes totalling 317 MW, of which 8 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).

Book the survey

Book a roof survey at your Reading school

We survey school and college roofs throughout Berkshire. We need the postcode, a rough roof area and your half hourly meter data if the trust has it. From that we model what the roof carries, what it generates against the timetable, and which of the funding routes actually suits a school of your size.

Lenzie Consulting Ltd arranges the survey and passes your details to an MCS-certified installation partner so they can quote. We do not carry out the installation ourselves.

Reading school solar, answered

How much would a school roof near Reading generate?: Modelled at 907 kWh per kWp a year, a 250 kWp array on a Reading school models at about 226,800 kWh. What decides whether that is worth doing is how much of it the school uses itself, not the total. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
How does the school year affect a solar scheme in Reading?: It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.4 percent of the Reading generating year lands in July and August (EU PVGIS v5.2), and a closed school still runs servers, comms, refrigeration and ventilation. What that base load does not absorb is either stored, exported under an agreement with Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
Which network operator handles the connection at a Reading school?: Applications go to Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, who run the network across Berkshire. An export-limited offer usually still works for a school, because the summer surplus is the part you were least likely to be paid much for anyway.
What does Reading require for solar on a school building?: Roof-mounted solar on a non-domestic building often falls within permitted development under Part 14 of the General Permitted Development Order, subject to limits on how far the panels stand proud of the roof plane and, above a threshold, to prior approval from Reading on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Reading before a design is finalised.
How many schools are there around Reading?: Reading has 61 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 24,669 pupils on roll. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools. We survey across the whole of that area, and where a trust holds several sites we look at them in one pass.

Nearby

All Berkshire locations