Specialist solar panels for schools in Cambridge

Schools near Cambridge already on the planning record

The Renewable Energy Planning Database records 1 school and college solar scheme in the CB1 postcode district. A 1,000 kWp roof mounted array at St Bedes Inter-Church School holds consent and is awaiting construction. The applicant on record is Solar Options for Schools.

We had nothing to do with any of them. They are public planning records, and they are on this page because the useful question for a governing body is not whether school solar works in the abstract but whether it has been consented nearby. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

The site plan at the top of this page is a generic estate drawn to show scale and sequencing. It is not St Bedes Inter-Church School, and it is not any other building in Cambridge. We hold no drawings, roof data or consumption data for the schools named above.

The median array applied for here is 1,000 kWp. At 1,000 kWp you are covering roughly 2,970 square metres of roof once walkways, edge zones and rooflight setbacks come out, which on most sites means a sports hall plus one teaching block rather than the whole estate.

School rooftop solar across Cambridgeshire

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Cambridge models at 906 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,160 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 1,000 kWp array, sized to the median array applied for at schools around Cambridge itself, models at about 906,000 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 2,970 square metres of clear roof. That size is not one we chose. It is what schools in this district have actually applied for.

Spread across the year that is about 229,200 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 47,100 kWh across December and January. UK Power 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.

The summer holiday problem for a Cambridge school

25.3 percent of the annual output modelled for Cambridge arrives in the two months a school uses least (EU PVGIS v5.2). Term ends in the third week of July and the buildings stay largely empty until September. June is the strongest single month here at 13.7 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.

The inverse holds at the other end. December and January together return only 5.2 percent of the year, and those are the months with the heating, the lighting and the full timetable all running at once. The roof makes 5.6 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 Cambridge changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.

The daily curve does the same thing in miniature. Load drops sharply after about three o'clock, generation does not, so the last three hours of a summer afternoon are pushing into an empty building unless something absorbs them. Half hourly meter data is the only way to see how much.

A Cambridge 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.

How many schools Cambridge has

Cambridge has 44 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 14,781 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 32 primary, 8 secondary, 1 special and 3 further education, at an average of 336 pupils a site. A ratio of 4 to one tells you where the roof area is. It is not with the 32 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.

Grid connection through UK Power Networks

UK Power Networks operates the distribution network across Cambridgeshire, so the export application goes to them. Anything larger than 3.68 kW per phase falls under G99, which means an application before commissioning rather than a notification afterwards. A constrained network is not the end of a scheme. Capping export costs little when the building already absorbs most of what the roof produces.

Across Cambridgeshire the planning database records 172 solar schemes totalling 2422 MW, of which 46 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).

Questions governors ask us about Cambridge schools

What would a 1,000 kWp array produce at a Cambridge school?

Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 906 kWh per kWp a year puts a 1,000 kWp array at around 906,000 kWh, on roughly 2,970 square metres of roof. The value of that depends on your term time load. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.

What happens to the electricity during the summer holidays in Cambridge?

Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.3 percent of the year is modelled to arrive in July and August here (EU PVGIS v5.2), against a site running on holiday base load. Lettings, holiday clubs and summer works take some of it, storage takes more, and the rest is an export question for UK Power Networks.

Who do we apply to for export near Cambridge?

Only UK Power Networks can answer it for your connection. What we can say is that a capped export limit rarely breaks a school scheme, because the array that suits a school is sized to the term time load rather than to the roof.

Do we need planning permission in Cambridge?

Often not, because panels on the roof of a school building usually sit within permitted development for non-domestic buildings. The exceptions are listed buildings, conservation areas and arrays that project too far above the roof plane, and larger schemes still need prior approval from Cambridge. We confirm it either way.

Has a school near CB1 already done this?

One school scheme is on record in this postcode district, including a 1,000 kWp array at St Bedes Inter-Church School that holds consent and is awaiting construction. We were not involved in it. It is a public planning record, and it matters less as proof that solar works than as evidence of what this authority and this network operator have already accepted. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

How many schools are there around Cambridge?

Cambridge has 44 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 14,781 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

• School roofs in Peterborough
• School roofs in St Neots
• School roofs in Wisbech
• School roofs in Huntingdon
• School roofs in March
• School roofs in Ely

All Cambridgeshire locations