Specialist solar panels for schools in Cardiff City Centre
National Grid Electricity Distribution runs the network around Cardiff City Centre, and on a school site their answer on export shapes the design as much as the roof pitch does. A survey here starts with the covering and the structure, then the incoming supply, then what the timetable actually draws.
Book a roof survey in Cardiff City Centre- 1 teaching block
- 2 hall and kitchen
- 3 sports hall
- 4 1960s block, no array
- first phase
- later phase
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.
Solar PV for academy trusts across Cardiff
We model output for Cardiff City Centre from the same source we use everywhere, EU PVGIS v5.2, and where a town has no modelled figure in the dataset we take it from the survey rather than publish an estimate.
Cardiff City Centre ranks 0 of 4 towns we cover in Cardiff on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 908 to 936, a spread of 28 kWh per kWp. Within Cardiff that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
The planning position for Cardiff City Centre schools
No school or college solar scheme appears in Cardiff City Centre and the area around it in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. That is a reporting threshold rather than a verdict. The database records generating stations from one megawatt upward reliably and smaller ones patchily, and almost every school array is a fraction of that, so a roof full of panels on a Cardiff City Centre secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
Connections around Cardiff City Centre are handled by National Grid Electricity Distribution, which sets the export limit for the site. Above 3.68 kW per phase the connection runs under G99, so the export limit is agreed in advance rather than assumed. Where the local network is constrained, an export-limited connection usually still makes the scheme work, because a school uses most of what the roof makes during the working day.
Send us the school postcode
Lenzie Consulting Ltd arranges roof surveys for schools across Cardiff. Send the school postcode and a rough idea of the roof area, and the last twelve months of half hourly meter data if the school holds it. We come back with what the roofs can carry, what they would generate against your own consumption, and the funding routes open to a school.
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.
What Cardiff City Centre trusts ask before a survey
- Which network operator handles the connection at a Cardiff City Centre school?
- Applications go to National Grid Electricity Distribution, who run the network across Cardiff. 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.